taught his followers to hate the Progressives and to give free expression to their hatred.[1]
Enough has been said to make clear how fundamental and how natural were the divergences between Lassalle and the Progressives. Lassalle styled the Progressives a "clique" and inveighed against "a Louis-Philippe monarchy created by the bourgeoisie".[2] To Karl Marx the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was part of an elaborate epic economic theory; to Ferdinand Lassalle it was rather the precise, definite political fact of the fight between the Prussian Progressives and his own Workingmen's Association. Marx, in order to subdue the bourgeoisie, would have the proletariat make no terms whatsoever with the landed aristocracy and other supports of a conservative society which to him represented but an anachronistic survival of an older economic struggle. Lassalle, on the other hand, for reasons of practical politics in Germany, found himself gradually impelled into Conservative or quasi-Conservative lanes and by-ways. He could see good points in what the English have termed "Tory Socialism" more clearly than in middle-class liberalism; and many of his utterances must have been as pleasing to Bismarck as they were angering to the Progressives. He insisted that in the pending constitutional conflict the Prussian Conservative government could not and should not yield to "the clique", but he suggested that
it might well call the people upon the scene and trust to them. To do this, it need but call to mind the origin of the monarchy, for all monarchy has originally been monarchy of the people. … A Louis-Philippe monarchy certainly could not do this; but a monarchy that still stands as kneaded out of its original dough, leaning upon the hilt of the sword, might quite certainly do this if it determined to pursue truly great, national, and democratic aims.[3]
Though Eduard Bernstein, the foremost authority on matters Lassallean, has assailed the usually accepted idea of Lassalle's intense nationalism,[4] the fact remains, nevertheless, that Bismarck in the pursuit of his foreign policy would have found a more loyal equerry in the leader of the Association of German Workingmen than in any member of the parliamentary majority. Lassalle ardently desired the political unification of Germany and perceived
- ↑ Lassalle set the pace in his vindictive Herr Bastiat-Schule von Delitzsch, der Oekonomische Julian, oder Kapital und Arbeit (January, 1864).
- ↑ Der Hochverraths-Prosess wider Ferd. Lassalle vor dem Staatsgerichtshofe zu Berlin am 12. März 1864 (ed. Bernstein), II. 743–830 (1893).
- ↑ Ibid.
- ↑ Bernstein, Ferdinand Lassalle as a Social Reformer.
