Ueber Verfassungswesen is a single continuous lecture, printed as a pamphlet, addressed to a Berlin citizens’ district association. It is not a systematic treatise on constitutional law and has no chapter structure; its form is that of a direct political address. Lassalle’s subject is the nature of a constitution, and his immediate target is the legalistic confidence of the liberal bourgeoisie in the Prussian constitutional conflict. The lecture argues that a constitution is not primarily a written document or a set of juristic rules, but the actual distribution of power in a country.
The central argument turns on a distinction between the “written” constitution and the “real” constitution. Lassalle asks what a constitution actually is, and rejects the answer that it is simply a law organizing state authority. A written constitution, he insists, is only the expression of underlying power relations. The real constitution consists of the actual social and political forces that hold sway: the monarchy, the army, the bureaucracy, the nobility, the propertied classes, and whatever other organized powers exist in the state. Law has force only where it corresponds to that real balance of power. If a written constitution conflicts with the actual distribution of power, the document does not prevail; it becomes a scrap of paper. Constitutional questions are therefore questions of power, not merely questions of legal interpretation.
From this premise Lassalle criticizes the liberal belief that a constitution can be defended by legal argument alone. The Prussian chamber might possess formal rights, including rights over the budget, but formal rights are illusory if the chamber lacks the real power to enforce them. The crown and its apparatus possess the army, the bureaucracy, and the machinery of government; the bourgeoisie possesses numbers, wealth, and legal claims, but not yet organized power. Lassalle does not deny that written constitutions have value. He denies that they can be effective when they are out of alignment with the real constitution. A constitution that does not express the actual power relations is not a constitution in the substantive sense; it is a prescription for conflict.
The lecture is thus both explanatory and polemical. It explains why constitutional conflicts arise and why legal texts alone cannot resolve them. It also attacks the self-deception of the liberal bourgeoisie, which imagines that the constitution is a kind of higher law that can restrain the crown without the bourgeoisie itself becoming a power. Lassalle’s practical implication is blunt: if the bourgeoisie wants constitutional government, it must become a real power capable of sustaining it; if it will not, it must accept the power of the existing state. The written constitution cannot do the work of political organization.
The text’s tone is rhetorical and pedagogical. Lassalle addresses his audience directly, uses rhetorical questions, and turns the liberals’ own constitutional language against them. He does not offer a detailed constitutional blueprint or a program of institutions. Instead, he offers a realist theory of constitutions: the “constitution” is the actual relation of forces, and the written constitution is only its outward form. The lecture’s force lies in that conceptual shift, which reframes the constitutional struggle as a struggle for power rather than a dispute over legal textual interpretation.
Beyond that central contrast, the lecture develops the implications of a sociological concept of constitution. It treats the “real constitution” as historically mutable: the balance of forces is not fixed, and a written constitution can become anachronistic when a new power—an organized class or social group—rises while the old legal form remains. Constitutional conflict is therefore not an anomaly but the normal form in which a lag between power and law becomes visible. The document becomes the terrain on which contending powers struggle, not a neutral arbiter standing above them.
Lassalle also sharpens the distinction between constitution and constitutional law. Constitutional law may organize institutions and set legal limits, but it cannot create the power that makes those arrangements effective. The lecture’s realism is analytic rather than a glorification of force: it explains why legal forms are binding only when sustained by social and political power, and why appeals to legality alone cannot settle a constitutional crisis. Its significance lies in this move—treating constitutions as expressions of social power and constitutional conflict as a struggle over the real distribution of power—rather than in proposing a new institutional design.
