Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Vernon L. Lidtke
of the historical school, a major current of legal thinking throughout most
of the nineteenth century, not only in Germany but in Europe generally.
It was expounded initially by Gustav Hugo, but promoted most effectively
by Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a prolific historian of law and influential
professor at the University of Berlin, where he and Hegel were competing
colleagues. Savigny first came to prominence in 1803 as an opponent of
codification and someone who distrusted all efforts to base legal systems
on rationalist principles or notions of natural law. He argued that properly
understood, law is the product of particular customs, accumulated rights and
privileges, and popular traditions of the people, and cannot be imported on
the basis of abstract principles.
The published product of Lassalle’s encounter with this conservative view
of law was one of his major works, The System of Acquired Rights,which
appeared in 1861 (coincidentally, the year of Savigny’s death). It was a sus-
tained attack on the conservative view that lawfully acquired rights, whether
based on inheritance or personal acquisition, could not be abolished or
diminished by any new law. This conservative tradition meant that even the
harshest feudal rights could be abolished only, if at all, by buying out the
privileged group. Lassalle directed some of his sharpest criticism against
the legal views of Friedrich Julius Stahl who called for the creation of state
statutes that would make acquired rights unassailable. At great length Lassalle
argued that traditions of the past cannot under any circumstances exercise
authority over the present and that perpetuating acquired rights would
be equivalent to recognising the independent sovereignty of individuals
(Lassalle 1919–20, ii,pp.303–45; Bernstein 1893,pp.81–90). Although
Lassalle wrote these two volumes as a scholarly contribution to legal theory,
his real motive, as he told Franz Duncker, was to create a legal system that
would be a ‘mighty fortress’ for revolution and socialism (Oncken 1912,
p. 188). He was determined to subvert the legal theories that supported
conservative, or even liberal political structures in order to clear the way for
the legitimation of democratic and socialist principles.
In much of his political thinking, Lassalle forcefully focused attention
on the decisive role played by power, from whatever source, in determin-
ing how institutions, laws and constitutions were shaped. In much of his
political and social thinking Lassalle was a fully-fledged realist, though his
optimistic nature also encouraged occasional flights of fancy. In his lecture
of 1862, On Constitutions, he argued that the nature of constitutions is always
determined by power relationships, and he specifically meant the power of
economic and social classes (Lassalle 1919–20, i,pp.36–8, 52). In a blunt
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statement of the overriding significance of power by itself, he declared that
‘basically questions of constitutions are not questions of law, but questions of
power;...written constitutionsare onlyof lastingvaluewhen theyarean
accurate expression of real power relationships in society’ (Lassalle 1919–20,
i,p.60). Lassalle warned that authoritarian monarchical government might
grant written constitutions that allowed a minuscule amount of power to
the representatives of the people, but would not permit them to share power
or to implement the ‘will of the people’ in any meaningful way. In a sec-
ond speech on constitutions, What Now (1862), he urged German liberals
that they had to expose this kind of ‘sham constitutionalism’ and fight it
relentlessly (Lassalle 1919–20, i,pp.102–5).
Lassalle articulated much of his political thinking in speeches and pam-
phlets designed to provide the new labour party with a body of relevant
knowledge on history, economics, politics and social theory, and to set
forth the fundamental principles, goals and strategies of the movement.
Many members of the socialist labour movement, like Bebel, first learned
about socialism by reading Lassalle’s speeches and writings and only years
later turned to the works of Marx and Engels (Bebel 1911–13, i,pp.130–
1). Two speeches were particularly significant as an illustration of Lassalle’s
political ideas as they related to the incipient labour movement. The first
was ‘On the Connection of the Current Epoch with the Idea of the Work-
ers’ Estate’ which he gave to an artisan association in a Berlin suburb (April
1862), and then published simply as The Workers’ Programme. The second
was the ‘Public Letter to the Central Committee’ (March 1863), a detailed
and creative response to the invitation to address a forthcoming congress of
associations of artisans and workers in Leipzig. As explications of principles
and goals, and as calls for action, these are superb examples of Lassalle’s com-
mand of the art of political communication. Even in print today, one senses
the force of his brilliant mind and spirited personality and can imagine the
excitement of listeners, for he was a charismatic orator.
Lassalle’s political thinking should always be understood in relation to his
fundamental and lasting commitment to what he called ‘pure and uncom-
promising democracy’ (Lassalle 1919–20, ii,p.79), though it is also true
that he sometimes failed to make this explicit and thereby left an impression
that he may have strayed to a more conservative outlook. At the core of
his thinking, both for his own philosophy, and as a central principle for
the burgeoning labour movement, was the demand for universal manhood
suffrage, with direct and secret elections. This was an absolute necessity
for any democratic philosophy; a political system with less than universal
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suffrage could never claim to be a democracy. Strategic considerations also
recommended stressing universal suffrage. In The Workers’ Programme Las-
salle explained in a long discour se on the phases of historical development
that the time had arrived when the social and political principles associ-
ated with the Arbeiterstand (Workers’ Estate) should become the dominant
force in society. Just as the modern bourgeois principle (capitalism) had dis-
placed the principle of the nobility, so the Arbeiterstand was on the threshold
of transforming society according to its democratic and social principles.
But at present it possessed no means to implement its goals. For Lassalle,
universal manhood suffrage would be that instrument. Since the Arbeiter-
stand constituted the vast majority of the population, implementation of
one-man one-vote would mean that no serious obstacles would stand in
the way of acquiring control of state power (Lassalle 1919–20, ii,pp.147–
202). (It might be noted that Lassalle’s use of the term Arbeiterstand in these
speeches did not mean that he identified with a feudal view of the social
order, but participated in a common usage of the time. He frequently
used ‘working class’ and one can see that he often thought of the terms as
interchangeable.)
But why would the working class fail to do what previous dominant
classes had done, that is, use the power of the state to create privileges for
themselves and impose burdens on other social groups? Lassalle assured his
audience that the ‘moral content’ of the principle of the working class was
itself universalist and its benefits extended to all humans. This was possible,
he argued, because workers owned nothing that they would seek to pre-
serve once they gained dominance. The working class stood in harmony
with the ‘development of all of the people’, ‘the progress of culture’ and
the ‘advance of freedom’. Its cause is the cause of ‘all humanity’. Here
Lassalle had given way to his strong sense of optimism but also, perhaps, to
a feeling that workers needed a degree of self-esteem that was unknown
to them. A vibrant belief in the moral superiority – which is what Lassalle
claimed – of the principles of the Arbeiterstand could do much to legiti-
mate a blatant drive for power. It is important to emphasise that Lassalle’s
insistence on the centrality of universal manhood suffrage meant that he
believed that a parliamentary form of government was completely com-
patible with a socialist programme. He did not argue that parliamentary
government was a particularly bourgeois political form that would not
survive into a socialist historical epoch. Although Lassalle would some-
times utter broad notions about a future socialist society, his ideas were not
based in historical or economic determinism. For all of his Hegelianism,
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he always stressed the need for voluntarist human action to achieve socialist
goals.
It is appropriate to note two points that separated Lassalle and the Marx-
ists. Where he assumed that parliamentary democracy would function as part
of a socialist society, Marxists maintained that parliamentary forms belonged
only to a bourgeois-liberal phase of historical development and would be
discarded under socialism. There was also a striking difference between
Lassalle and the Marxists on how to conceive of the state theoretically and
with respect to its place in a socialist society. Lassalle did believe with Marx
and others that historically and in the present, all states were controlled by a
dominant class, or a coalition of classes. Where the two parted company was
on the issue of what would happen to the state when the working class had
achieved its goal of dissolving social classes. To the Marxists that meant that
there would be no class dominance and no reason for the state to exist. In
time, the state would vanish. Lassalle did not speculate about the withering
of the state. On the contrary, he remained closer to his Hegelian heritage,
but continued to believe that democratic forces could transform the state
into an instrument to achieve the highest goals of humanity. It is true that
Lassalle’s formulations can leave the impression that ‘state’ means any state.
When he writes, for example, that ‘the state is [the institution that] has
the function to bring about . . . the full freedom of humanity’ he fails to
add that he did not believe that the Prussian state under the Hohenzollern
dynasty would carry out that mission (Lassalle 1919–20, ii,p.197). Far from
it, he was through and through a sharp critic of the Prussian state. When
he speaks of the purpose of the state, he refers, on a philosophical level,
to the moral and cultural goals that a state should seek to realise, not to
the possibility that they may have done so in historical reality. ‘The pur-
pose of the state’, he wrote, ‘is to bring about the positive and progressive
development of humanity, in other words . . . to give real existence to the
culture of which humanity is capable.’ But then in the following sentences
he makes it clear that he has been speaking of a democratised state under
the guidance of the labour movement: ‘Thus a state which is dominated
by the idea of the Arbeiterstand would no longer do what all others have
hitherto done, . . . but would with the highest degree of clar ity and with
complete awareness take as its task to realise the moral nature of the state’
(Lassalle 1919–20, ii,p.198).
In Lassalle’s view it was absolutely essential for workers to gain control
of the state. One reason derived from his understanding of the operation of
the wage system in a capitalist economy. His key notion was that there was
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an ‘iron law of economics’ that always keeps wages at approximately the
subsistence level. If wages rise for a period, workers and others are likely
to feel confident to raise larger families, which over time will expand the
labour supply to a point where wages will decline again. On the other
side, wages cannot drop below subsistence levels because entrepreneurs
need able-bodied workers. How can this vicious cycle of the ‘iron law of
economics’ be broken? The only way according to Lassalle is for people
who belong to the class of non-propertied and non-holders of capital to
take control of the state. In that way they can become their own employers,
and when there is no longer a difference between employer and employee
the problem will be solved. For Lassalle, the state and political action were
crucial for solving the social question of the time. The deprivations of
workers could be removed, not through the self-help associations, such
as consumer societies, proposed by left liberals like Hermann Schulze-
Delitzsch, but only through the kind of political action that would lead to
control of the state by the Arbeiterstand. The logic of his starting point – that
the interests of the social classes were in conflict and the disinherited must
gain control of the state – led Lassalle to conclude that the political interests
of workers could not be harmonised with those of bourgeois liberals. Even
well-intentioned liberals, such as as Schulze-Delitzsch, promoted remedies
that fell far short of the goals that workers had to pursue if they were
going to gain sufficient control of the state to use it to annul the ‘iron law
of economics’ and achieve emancipation. That is why Lassalle expended
great effort to write his long polemic against Schulze-Delitzsch – Herr
Bastiat-Schulze von Delitzsch – which turned out to be his most important
publication on economics (Lassalle 1919–20, v,pp.27–339; Na’aman 1970,
pp. 688–99). Schulze-Delitzsch’s sympathy for the plight of the Arbeiterstand
and his ideas for solving the social question of the time appealed to many
workers and artisans who looked to liberals with a social conscience as
their political friends and leaders. That is why in the ‘Public Letter’ Lassalle
warned the organisers of the workers’ association in Leipzig against further
collaboration with the liberals and pressed them, successfully, to constitute
themselves as an independent political party that would make the demand
for universal manhood suffrage its central tenet (Lassalle 1919–20, iii,p.47).
3 The Volksstaat
The members of the Workers’ Educational Societies who declined to join
Lassalle’s General Association of German Workingmen eventually created
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the Social Democratic Labour Party at their congress in Eisenach in 1869.
Three political issues were prominent among the Eisenachers: their rela-
tionship to liberal and democratic thought; the influence of the Marx-led
First International with which they were affiliated; and their conception of
the state, both as it existed and what it would be in a socialist society. On all
these and other topics, Bebel and Liebknecht were the recognised leaders of
the Eisenachers and their speeches and writings were accepted as authentic
expressions of the party as a whole. Although close political partners and
friends for nearly four decades, Liebknecht and Bebel were also a study in
contrasts.
Liebknecht came from an educated family of pastors and officials, studied
philology and philosophy for a time at the university in Marburg, and
earned his reputation as a democratic radical with communist leanings in
the revolutions of 1848–9. Bebel, fourteen year s younger, the son of a
low-ranking army officer, lost both of his parents by the age of thirteen,
but because of his native ability and self-discipline became a master wood
turner at the age of twenty-four (1864) and was elected chairman of the
Leipzig Workers’ Educational Society a year later. In the early years of
their collaboration, Bebel was the pupil and Liebknecht the teacher and
mentor. Not only had Liebknecht the advantage of formal education, but in
London exile in the 1850s he became a personal friend of Marx and Engels,
a relationship that gave him a certain aura in Germany as an authentic
representative of their ideas. By the end of the 1870s, however, through his
intelligence, industriousness, intellectual curiosity and talent as a speaker and
writer, Bebel surpassed Liebknecht in the eyes of Marx and Engels and also
as the more effective and esteemed leader of the socialist labour movement.
The Eisenachers were no less committed than Lassalle to radical political
democracy, perhaps even more so, and their version was rooted in the views
of the Volkspartei as embodied in the idea of the Volksstaat. Conceptions of
the state, as with Lassalle, played a major role. This concept was so central
and important to them that they named their party newspaper Der Volksstaat
(1869–76). They conceived t he Volksstaat as a fully democratic system, with
a parliament, based on universal, direct and secret manhood suffrage, as well
as in elections to all other representative bodies. (In the 1860s the socialist
movements did not yet advocate votes for women.) It would also introduce
the principle of direct legislation by the people which, in practice, would
involve initiative and referendum. To ensure that persons of limited means
could serve in parliament, deputies were to receive per diem allowances,
a feature unknown in most political systems of the time, but already put
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forward by the Chartists. Although most discussions of the Volksstaat did
not declare explicitly that it would also be a republic, that was understood
implicitly. At their trial for high treason in 1872, Bebel and Liebknecht
forthrightly stated that their movement understood the Volksstaat to be a
republican form of government (Leidigkeit 1960,pp.142, 165).
The Eisenachers spelled out the features of the Volksstaat in even more
detail. They affirmed that it would do the following: abolish all privileges
based on property, bir th, class and religion; prescribe the separation of
church and state, as well as the separation of church and public schools;
replace the standing army with a people’s militia; provide free public educa-
tion and make primary school education obligatory; create an independent
court system with juries and free legal services; and rescind all laws that
put restrictions on the press and the right of free association. Leaders of
the Eisenachers frequently elaborated on their conception of the Volksstaat.
In his references to the Volksstaat, Bebel stressed that his party, in con-
trast to the democrats in the Volkspartei, believed that the acquisition of
political power by the workers’ movement and the democratisation of the
state constituted a preliminary stage to the implementation of their socialist
programme. In the people’s state, socialist measures would be instituted by
the people themselves, not by a ruling class, and that would mean that ‘in
such a state, self-help is people’s help, people’s help is state-help; self-help
and state-help therefore are identical; there is no contradiction’. Bebel also
wanted to avoid the impression that the Eisenachers aimed to help only
workers, so he explained that under ‘working class’ he included not only
dependent wage earners, but also ‘artisans and small farmers, intellectual
workers [geistiger Arbeiter], writers, elementary school teachers and lower
civil servants, all ofwhom suffer under present conditions...and fall vic-
tim to modern developments’ (Bebel 1870,pp.10–11).
The Volksstaat continued to be the key political concept not only for
the Eisenachers, but all of its defining characteristics were retained in the
Gotha programme adopted when the Lassalleans and Eisenachers united
into one party in 1875. The new party now preferred the term Freistaat
(Free State), but the substance was the same. In this way the unified party
continued to manifest its roots in the political thought of German liberalism
and democracy, a point denounced by Marx in his extremely harsh critique
of the Gotha programme. Engels too had access to the preliminary draft of
the Gotha programme, and in a letter to Bebel (March 1875) two months
before the unity congress met, remonstrated strongly that all mention of
the ‘state’, ‘people’s state’ and ‘free state’ should be omitted from any and
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all socialist programmes. Engels’ arguments ultimately influenced Bebel
to alter substantially his political thinking about the state, and this new
view was gradually disseminated throughout the socialist movement. Engels
explained to Bebel that because ‘the state is only a transitional institution
which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, in order to hold down
one’s adversaries by force, it is pure nonsense to talk of a free people’s
state: so long as the proletariat still uses the state, it does not use it in the
interest of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon
as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.
We would therefore propose to replace state everywhere by “community”
[Gemeinwesen] a good old German word which can very well represent the
French word “commune”’ (Marx and Engels 1955, ii,pp.41–2). This was
strong medicine indeed. Engels explicated a view of the state that must
have seemed very strange to Bebel. He called upon Bebel to discard, or
drastically revise, all of the principles of political democracy as he knew
them. Could Bebel easily absorb the sweeping implications of the theory of
the withering away of the state? What could Bebel and his comrades have
done to introduce ‘Gemeinwesen’ or other synonyms for ‘Commune’, or
‘Commune’ itself, as the foundation on which to build a large framework
of political thought?
It is true that the Commune resonated with German socialists. Both the
Lassalleans and Eisenachers had expressed strong support for the Par isian
Communards and the principles of the Commune as they understood them.
Bebel spoke forcefully in defence of the Communards. In May 1871 he
told the deputies that ‘the whole European proletariat and everyone who
still loves freedom and independence looks to Paris. Gentlemen, if in this
moment Paris is suppressed, then remember this much, that the struggle
in Paris is only a minor outpost skirmish, that the great issue in Europe is
still before us and that before a few years pass the battle cry of the Paris
proletariat, “war on the palaces, peace for the cottages, death to misery and
laziness!” will become the battle cry of the whole European proletariat’
(Bebel, 1911–1913, ii,pp.348–69). In later year s Bebel continued to herald
the greatness of the Paris Commune (Lidtke 1966,pp.41–2). This total
identification with the cause of the Paris Commune contributed greatly to
the popular image of the socialists as radical revolutionaries who would take
to the barricades when they chose to act.
But to praise the Commune was one thing – to build on it another.
Despite all of his speaking and writing, Bebel never attempted to base a
political conception of socialism upon the Commune. The same is true
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Vernon L. Lidtke
of others. Karl Kautsky, social democracy’s chief theorist and disseminator
of Marxism, tells us that from the time of the Commune, for which he
had sympathy (he was about seventeen at the time), he was attracted to
socialism. Although Kautsky seems to have believed that the Commune
should be viewed as a model for socialism, he too never explored what that
meant theoretically or practically (Kautsky 1960,pp.182–6; Steenson 1978,
p. 20).
Instead of immediately taking up Engels’ recommendation on the Com-
mune, Bebel held onto the Volksstaat, and years passed before he absorbed
and then passed along some of the views Engels had presented to him in
1875. In the first edition (1879)ofWoman and Socialism Bebel used Volksstaat
as he had before, but in the 1883 edition he replaced it with a concise account
of the doctrine of the withering away of the state. From about that time,
Volkstaat also vanished from his speeches and writings without, however,
being replaced by Gemeinwesen or any other political concept with historical
meaning or theoretical clarity.
In following Marx, and, at the time particularly Engels, social democratic
thought embraced the speculation that a socialist society of the future would
not need a political state, that nothing more would be required than non-
political administrative structures necessary to carry out the basic functions
of production and distribution. Engels spelled out this message of the with-
ering away of the state in much greater detail in his polemical book, Herr
Eugen D
¨
uhring’s Revolution in Science (1878), three chapters of which were
published independently as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (German edition,
1883) which became the most popular source in Germany for understand-
ing Marxism in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. (In the 1870s,
Eugen D
¨
uhring, a Privatdozent at the University of Berlin, with vaguely
socialist inclinations, promoted a ‘socialitary system’ of harmony between
capital and labour and gained a following among young Social Democratic
intellectuals chiefly because of his battles with the university authorities.
D
¨
uhring’s popularity, though it proved to be temporary, nonethless made
Engels extremely anxious and impelled him to write an extensive refutation,
known commonly as Anti-D
¨
uhring, which, ironically, is the only reason the
name of the Privatdozent continued to appear in socialist discourse.) Engels
explained that ‘as soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in
subjection . . . nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive
force,astate,isnolongernecessary...Stateinterferenceinsocialrelations
becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of
itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things,
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German socialism and social democracy 1860–1900
and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”.
It dies out’ (Marx and Engels 1955, ii,pp.150–1).
By the early 1880s Bebel and other Social Democrats were broadcasting
this argument almost word for word. In the extremely popular Woman and
Socialism, Bebel included a short chapter on the ‘abolition of the state’ which
illustrates how he understood Engels’ precepts.
Together with the state will vanish its representatives: ministers, parliaments, standing
army, police, cour ts, lawyers and district attorneys, prison officials, collectors of taxes
and duties; in short, the entire political apparatus. Armories and other military buildings,
palaces of justice and administration, prisons, etc. will then serve better purposes. Tens
of thousands of laws, decrees and regulations will become just so much waste-paper;
their only value will be a historical one. The great and yet so petty parliamentary
struggles, during which men of the tongue imagine that by their orations they rule and
guide the world, will disappear. They will make room for colleges of administration
and administrative delegations whose purpose will be to consider and determine the
best means and methods of production and distribution, to decide how large a quantity
of supplies is required, to introduce and utilise new appliances and improvements in art,
science, education, traffic, etc., to organise and direct industry and ag riculture. (Bebel
1910,pp.435–6)
Bebel’s utopian vision of socialism implied that political thinking was of
no real consequence for social democracy, but could be relevant only with
respect to tactics during the era of capitalism. Political thought did not
vanish from socialist discourse, to be sure, but for many it was of marginal
interest. In the 1880s, as the Social Democrats discarded their commitment
to the ideal of the Volksstaat, they were seriously weakening one of their
most important links to the traditions of European political democracy and
liberalism, a rupture that, rather than leading to increased theoretical clarity,
resulted more often in uncertainty and ambivalence. The no-state theory
left Social Democrats on a terrain that was difficult to chart.
Women’s issues played an important role in Bebel’s thinking already in
the 1860sand1870s, years before a socialist feminist movement existed.
The demands of the bourgeois feminists at the time focused on improving
educational and occupational opportunities for women, especially for those
who were single. Louise Otto-Peters, for many years the bourgeois move-
ment’s most eminent leader, believed that such benefits should be shared
by working-class women as well as those of affluence. Bourgeois feminists
did not call for political rights or social equality, but emphasised female
difference, set forth a doctrine of ‘spiritual motherhood’, and promoted
the Kindergarten movement. Within the early socialist labour movement,
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