The book is a documentary collection of Ferdinand Lassalle’s letters to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels written between 1849 and 1862. It is not a narrative biography, memoir, or systematic treatise; its contents are the letters themselves, arranged within the period named in the title. Because only Lassalle’s side of the correspondence is included, the volume presents the relationship as it appeared to Lassalle and through his own voice, without Marx’s and Engels’s replies.
Across the collection, the letters follow Lassalle’s political, legal, literary, and philosophical activities during the years after the revolutionary upheavals and through the reactionary decades leading up to 1862. They touch on his legal struggles and political prosecutions, including his involvement in the Hatzfeldt case and his conflicts with Prussian authorities; his journalistic and publication projects; his studies in philosophy, law, and political economy; and his repeated efforts to maintain contact and collaboration with Marx and Engels despite distance, differing temperaments, and theoretical disagreements. The correspondence also records practical and personal matters: requests for information and opinions, comments on Marx’s and Engels’s writings, plans for journals or books, financial concerns, and responses to contemporary political events.
The letters are occasional and often polemical rather than polished autobiography. They show Lassalle presenting himself as an ally, collaborator, and sometimes critic of Marx and Engels, while also asserting his own intellectual independence and political ambitions. The collection’s value lies in this documentary texture: it offers a running record of Lassalle’s preoccupations and self-presentation from 1849 to 1862, and it illuminates the early socialist milieu through the friction and affinity of one of its most important correspondences.
The letters also document Lassalle’s theoretical self-fashioning: he uses the correspondence to test and assert his own positions on philosophy, law, political economy, and the relationship between theory and political practice. Recurring themes include the meaning and strategy of revolution under reactionary conditions, the role of legality and state institutions in political struggle, the tasks of journalism and publication, and the problem of maintaining an independent intellectual and political stance while seeking alliance with Marx and Engels. The collection shows him arguing over method and emphasis, defending his own projects, and measuring his work against theirs, so that the letters are as much a record of intellectual rivalry and self-justification as of collaboration.
Because the volume contains only Lassalle’s letters, it also exposes the asymmetries and rhetorical strategies of the correspondence: he writes to absent interlocutors, anticipates objections, explains his conduct, and constructs a public-facing image of himself as a serious theorist and political actor. The letters preserve the texture of nineteenth-century socialist intellectual life—reports on reading and drafting, negotiations over contributions and publications, assessments of censorship and political conditions, and repeated attempts to convert shared theoretical commitments into practical cooperation. The book’s significance lies in this documentary density: it offers a primary source for how Marx and Engels were read, disputed, and appropriated by a contemporary who was neither simple disciple nor outright opponent, and it records Lassalle’s own developing conception of political action, legal struggle, and socialist publicity as he presented it to his closest theoretical interlocutors.
