On the Essence of Constitutions (Über Verfassungswesen)
On the Essence of Constitutions is the text of a public lecture Ferdinand Lassalle delivered in Berlin in April 1862, during the mounting constitutional conflict between the Prussian crown and the liberal majority in the House of Deputies. It is not a treatise with chapters and apparatus but a sustained spoken argument, addressed to a popular audience and designed to demystify the idea of a constitution.
The central distinction
The lecture turns on a single, sharply drawn opposition: the difference between the written constitution (die geschriebene Verfassung) and the real constitution (die wirkliche Verfassung). Lassalle’s starting point is the widespread habit of treating the written constitutional text with superstitious reverence—as a fixed, quasi-sacred, supra-historical document whose authority rests simply on its having been enacted as law. Against this view he insists that the written constitution is never the foundation of political life. It is, at most, the juridical expression of something prior and more powerful.
The real constitution, for Lassalle, is the actual distribution of power among the social forces of a country—the crown, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the army, the propertied classes, the workers, and the institutions through which these forces act. It is not made by a document or decreed by a legislator; it is a historical fact, the settled product of struggles, property relations, and the prevailing balance of forces. The written constitution, by contrast, is a piece of paper that records, more or less accurately, the outcome of those forces at a given moment. It is, in Lassalle’s formulation, a juridical expression of relations of power that have already been established in society.
The consequences of the distinction
From this follows the lecture’s central claim: a written constitution remains in force only for so long as it continues to correspond to the real constitution beneath it. When the actual balance of forces shifts—when one class grows in strength or another declines—the written text loses its foundation. It may be amended peacefully, through reform; or it may be broken by revolution. What it cannot do is sustain itself by legal argument alone. Law, in Lassalle’s account, is not an independent force standing above society; it is power that has been formalized and fixed in a code. Where the underlying power has moved, the code will be swept aside, however solemn its wording and however elaborate its guarantees.
Lassalle develops this thesis through historical illustration rather than abstract deduction. He turns to French history to show the mechanism at work. The Charter of 1814, granted by Louis XVIII after the fall of Napoleon, was presented as a free constitution and was treated by jurists as the settled framework of the regime. But it rested on a particular real constitution—a compromise between the restored monarchy and the propertied bourgeoisie. When Charles X attempted to rule against the changed balance of forces and issued the July Ordinances of 1830, the written charter could not save him; the July Revolution broke out, the monarchy fell, and the charter was subsequently revised. The lesson Lassalle draws is that the revision of the text followed, and merely registered, a prior change in the real constitution.
He applies the same analysis to the Prussian situation of his own day, where the House of Deputies and the crown were locked in dispute over the army reorganization and the budget. The deputies claimed the right to approve taxation annually; the government claimed royal prerogative. Lassalle’s point is that no clause of the written constitution could resolve the dispute, because the question at stake was not a legal one but a question of which power was actually the stronger. A right written on paper, he argues, is worthless unless it is backed by a real force capable of defending it. Constitutional rights are not self-executing; they are effective only when the balance of social and political power supports them.
The political conclusion
The lecture closes with a political moral addressed directly to its audience. Constitutional questions, Lassalle argues, are not lawyers’ questions but questions of power. The struggle over a constitution is therefore a struggle for political power, and it cannot be settled by jurists, by appeals to legality, or by the invocation of sacred texts. From this the working class is meant to draw the conclusion that its own interests are served not by revering the written constitution but by becoming a real power factor in the state—by organizing and acquiring the weight that would make the real constitution reflect its presence. The lecture is thus both an exercise in historical explanation and an agitational appeal: it seeks to strip the constitution of its mystique and to redirect attention from the legal text to the actual forces that sustain or undermine it.
Character and method
Throughout, Lassalle’s method is historical and sociological rather than juridical. He consistently refuses to treat constitutions as self-contained systems of norms, and instead reads them as records of social conflict and class power. The style is that of a public speaker—direct address, vivid historical narrative, and recurrent analogies drawn from ordinary experience—rather than that of a systematic philosopher. The result is a compact, polemical argument whose central insight, that written constitutions are conditioned by and dependent upon the real distribution of power, is stated with unusual force and illustrated with historical cases chosen to make the point unmistakable.
The constitution as a relation of forces
The lecture’s central distinction is not merely historical but conceptual: it separates the constitution from constitutional law. Constitutional law is the written or enacted articulation of offices, procedures, and rights; the constitution itself is the actual arrangement of power that such law presupposes. On this view, a constitution is not a norm that creates and masters power but the settled form of an existing relation of forces. Its “essence” is therefore relational: it lies in how social and political powers stand toward one another, and the legal text is only one expression of that relation. This is why the same formal provision can be effective in one balance of forces and empty in another. Constitutional law may define the shape of institutions, but it does not supply the power that makes them operate; the legal constitution is derivative, formalizing and stabilizing a real constitution that already exists.
Against juridical illusion
The lecture’s polemic is directed at what may be called juridical illusion: the belief that constitutional questions can be settled by interpretation, legality, or the sanctity of a charter. Lassalle’s argument is that such appeals mistake the surface of constitutional life for its substance. This is not only a point about enforcement; it concerns meaning. A right, procedure, or guarantee has constitutional reality only as part of a power settlement that can sustain it. Written constitutions are not therefore unimportant—they are instruments, points of orientation, and records of a settlement—but they cannot substitute for the forces that uphold them. The lecture thus shifts attention from constitutional validity to constitutional efficacy, and treats the latter as primary.
Significance
The book’s significance lies in this reorientation. It offers a realist and sociological account of constitutionalism: the constitution is understood as a social and political fact before it is a legal norm. By making the real constitution the essence and the written constitution its expression, Lassalle provides a compact basis for analyzing constitutional conflict as a struggle of power factors. The lecture’s force comes from combining this general thesis with concrete constitutional struggles and with a direct political address, so that theoretical claim and agitational purpose reinforce each other. Its enduring interest is not a doctrine of how to draft constitutions but the insistence that constitutional order rests on power, and that legal forms are intelligible only in relation to the forces that uphold or transform them.
