Prophet of Modern Statism
Ferdinand Lassalle.
by David Footman.
Yale University Press. 251 pp. $3.50.

Ferdinand Lassalle, the son of a Jewish merchant, spent most of his thirty-nine years striving to obliterate this fact. He altered his name to conceal his Jewish origin and, though an only son, he refused to enter his father’s profitable business. But Jews, only recently freed from the ghetto, were still barred from the Prussian state service, and Lassalle was unable to realize his ambition to become a university professor. His final choice of a career involved a sense of degradation which he never overcame; hating, as he said, Jews and journalists, he was condemned by birth and circumstances to be both.

Earlier, he had wanted to be an actor—characteristically, a “great actor”; then he decided that he was “predestined to play in life itself the part which [he] had wanted to play upon the stage.” His role, unfortunately, had much of the burlesque about it. (George Meredith, in his novel which deals with some incidents in the life of Lassalle, indulgently called him a “tragic comedian.”) Lassalle’s final extravaganza underscores, in its caricature, his personal life and some of his political activities. Obsessed by reveries of knighterrantry, gallantry, and glory, he died in 1864 in a quixotic duel that he provoked over a girl whom he described as an “abandoned prostitute.”

David Footman, an English writer of fiction and biography, obviously sees in Lassalle, who was “larger than life and rather more vivid,” an ideal subject for his literary talents. This biography, based on easily available published material, and bearing the subtitle “The Romantic Revolutionary,” possesses the virtue of not quite measuring up to the standards of a Hollywood scenario. Mr. Footman is never gross, albeit sometimes naive in his effort at delicacy, especially in reference to Lassalle’s relations with Countess Hatzfeldt. Lassalle’s affaires are handled in the best of taste; a Victorian might be shocked, but modern readers, who are assured by the author that there are “few of us who will not find in Ferdinand Lassalle some disconcerting echo of our inner selves,” will find the tale hardly titillating.

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To his credit, the biographer does not confine himself to Lassalle’s loves, and constantly stresses his political and intellectual activities. The trouble is that Mr. Footman’s insights are superficial, and the inclusion of a page-and-a-half bibliographical note does not make it a work of scholarship. (Its publication by a university press is some cause for wonder.) True, the author has drawn upon the better known studies of Lassalle—but then the contents indicate that even more clearly than the bibliography.

Mr. Footman’s work suffers from a failure to assess the significance of the man, his ideas, and his influence for his time and ours. Lassalle was undoubtedly a ludicrous, incongruous figure. But he was more than that. In the Germanies of his lifetime, Lassalle had no monopoly on restlessness, flagrant excesses, snobbery, egocentrism, ruthless ambition, and a willingness, not necessarily cynical, to sacrifice all principle to expediency. Indeed, he might be viewed more as a social type than an aberration. Was not Lassalle’s generation typical of any society “on the make,” of times of social uprootedness, when old standards seem rather irrelevant, and new ones have not yet crystallized? By neglecting this context, except in a formal and uncritical way, Mr. Footman misses the significance of Lassalle’s personality.

Mr. Footman does not even raise the problem which Lassalle, the national socialist, posed almost a hundred years ago and which bedevils us today—that of the interrelationship of nationalism, socialism, and demogoguery in this age of mass literacy and universal suffrage. Karl Marx, who considered Lassalle both a foe and an upstart, grudgingly admitted that he was “an enemy of our enemies” and acknowledged the “immortal service” of the founder of the General German Workers Association in reviving the workers’ movement after the failure of the revolution of 1848. Lassalle “was after all the only man they were afraid of in Germany,” wrote Engels on learning of Lassalle’s death, although he later acknowledged that “for us. . . he would have been a fairly certain enemy in the future.” Both Marx and Lassalle agreed on the need of destroying the middle class. Differing, however, on the means to attain this end, they developed serious differences about the end as well.

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Like the struggle, seemingly trivial in its origin, between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in Russia over what to many appeared to be innocent and unimportant questions of phraseology, the conflict between Marx and Lassalle was much more than personal and did not end with the death of the contestants. Was Lassalle, with his program of economic amelioration and state-supported cooperatives, his political machinations—such as his readiness to align socialists on the side of Bismarck and the Prussian state—a forerunner of the type of political figure which has been so destructive of liberal values and socialist aspirations? Lassalle, who could “see in the crown the natural bearer of social dictatorship,” who held out the hope that the crown would “pursue a really revolutionary direction”; Lassalle, who boasted that he never heard a “No” addressed to him by his followers; Lassalle, who held that “we must weld the wills of all of us into a single hammer, and must place this hammer in the hands of a man in. . . [whom]. . . we have the necessary confidence so that he may be able with that hammer to strike! . . . With us there is not a trace of that malcontent spirit of Liberalism, of that malady of individual opinion. . . .” Shades of Hitler?

Despite Mr. Footman and his predecessors, a true understanding of Lassalle the man has not yet been achieved; but—and this is of infinitely greater importance—an understanding of Lassalle the political and historical figure, the herald and harbinger of the modern emphasis on the state (as contrasted with the liberals and with Marx), has not even been attempted.

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