Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter is a lecture by Ferdinand Lassalle addressed to a working-class audience. It is a rhetorical appeal rather than a systematic treatise: its subject is the relationship between systematic knowledge—Wissenschaft in the broad German sense of scholarship, philosophy, science, and culture—and the working class.
The lecture rejects the idea that higher knowledge is the natural property of the educated bourgeoisie and that workers should be content with narrow practical or vocational training. Lassalle argues that science belongs to humanity as a whole and that the exclusion of workers from it damages both the workers and science itself. He presents labor and knowledge as complementary rather than opposed: the worker is not merely a passive recipient of culture but a class with a claim to the full inheritance of human thought.
A central theme is the critique of class-bound education and of the gap between academic learning and life. Lassalle appeals to workers to claim science as their own, to see intellectual emancipation as part of social emancipation, and to recognize themselves as a historical force capable of making knowledge universal and practical. The tone is exhortatory and aimed at awakening self-confidence and a sense of mission, rather than at outlining a curriculum, an educational program, or an organizational plan.
The lecture thus treats “science and the workers” as a union to be achieved against the monopoly of learning by privileged classes. It insists that the working class stands within civilization as its coming bearer, and that knowledge must become a living force in the struggle for a freer social order.
The lecture sharpens its claim by treating the exclusion of workers from Wissenschaft as a form of dispossession. The intellectual achievements of humanity are presented as a common treasury that class society has enclosed; workers are asked to recover what is already theirs, not to receive a charitable supplement. This is why the argument insists on the full, demanding sense of science: a separate, simplified “workers’ knowledge” would reproduce the very tutelage it opposes. The demand is for access to the universal, critical activity of thought, with all its difficulty and rigor.
It also turns the critique inward: the educated classes are portrayed as having turned learning into a possession and a mark of status, so that their culture becomes narrow and lifeless. The workers, by contrast, are addressed as capable of reuniting knowledge with life and labor. The lecture’s significance is thus to make Bildung a class question—not a matter of individual self-improvement but of whether the working class can become a subject of culture. It frames the workers’ movement as a struggle over who may think universally, and it treats that struggle as integral to freedom.
