It has become the habit in Germany to regard Ferdinand Lassalle as the founder of the German workers' movement. And yet nothing could be less correct.
Life moves quickly for today's generation and they are quick to forget.
The movement of the forties, which culminated in the revolution of 1848 and ended with the reaction of 1849 to 1852, has already been forgotten together with its political and socialist literature. It is therefore necessary to recall that before and during the revolution of 1848 there existed amongst the workers, precisely in western Germany, a well-organised socialist party, which broke up after the Cologne Communist trial it is true, but whose individual members continued quietly to prepare the ground of which Lassalle later took possession. One must further recall that there existed a man who, as well as organising that party, had devoted his life's work to the scientific study of what was called the social question, i.e. the critique of political economy, and even prior to 1860 had published some of the significant results of his researches. But he was neither the initial founder of the German workers' movement, nor was he an original thinker. He studied jurisprudence at Bonn and later in Berlin, where, however, his preoccupation with philosophy soon turned him away from law.