Ferdinand Lassalle

Ferdinand Lassalle (1825 to 1864) was a German jurist, philosopher and socialist activist, best remembered as an initiator of the social democratic movement in Germany. Born in Breslau to a prosperous Jewish family, he became a follower of Hegelian philosophy in his youth and gained public renown in the 1840s and 1850s through a long and sensational legal case on behalf of Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt. In 1863 he founded the General German Workers' Association, the first independent German workers' party, whose platform sought socialism through state-aided producers' co-operatives won by universal suffrage; his political theories, a form of state socialism, are known as Lassalleanism. His philosophical treatise Heraclitus the Obscure appeared in 1857, and his relationship with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was complex and often antagonistic.