Democracy is derived in unbroken apostolic succession, and, as I hope to show, the "deposit of faith and morals" delivered by the Master Lassalle during his brief ministry to a mere handful of rather ignorant and poverty-stricken German workers (many of them of Jewish extraction) has been preserved jealously and zealously—one might almost say superstitiously—for the guidance and inspiration of some four and a quarter million German voters (1912). The real beginning of German Social Democracy dates from Lassalle's "Open Reply Letter" (Offenes Antwort-Schreiben) of 1863 rather than from the "Communist Manifesto" launched by Marx and Engels in 1848.
What was the essence of the gospel according to Lassalle? In the first place, it dogmatized the popular conviction that force and violence could not materially further any radical cause. Lassalle despised the French Revolution of 1789 as a compromising bourgeois revolution. He thought the German failure of 1848 only natural. Under the spell of Fichte and Hegel, he held in common with Marx and Engels that historical evolution (Entwicklung) is gradual and is determined by changing economic conditions, but, truer to Hegel and Fichte than Marx and Engels had been, he extolled the State as an eternal, unchanging concept, an end in itself. In this sense he quoted a passage from an address of Boeckh's in which the celebrated antiquarian appealed from the "State-Concept of Liberalism", the passive-policeman idea, to the "antique civilization" (Kultur) which had become once and for all the inalienable foundation of the German mind and which had given birth to the notion that the concept of the State must be so far enlarged that "the State shall be the institution in which the whole virtue of mankind shall realize itself".[1] "The immemorial vestal fire of all civilization, the State, I defend with you against those modern barbarians" (i. e., the Progressives of Prussia), he exclaimed to the judges of the Berlin Kammergericht in his speech on "Indirect Taxation".[2] So ideological did he make his concept of the State that he instilled into the workers a semi-mystical reverence for even the active-policeman Prussian State of his own day. In this respect a most literal Hegelian, he never uttered any of the ambiguities which characterized Marx and Engels. The one thing which he held in common with the Progressives was an abhorrence of violence.
- ↑ The clearest statement of Lassalle's idea of the State and of his repugnance to violent revolution is to be found in the Arbeiterprogramm (ed. Bernstein), II. 9–50 (1893), although all his writings are impregnated with the same idea and the same repugnance.
- ↑ Die Indirekte Steuer (ed. Bernstein), II. 388 (1893).
