Ferdinand Lassalle

Born in 1825 to a prosperous Jewish family in Breslau, Lassalle spent his youth steeped in Hegelian philosophy and gained public renown in the 1840s and 1850s defending Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in a sensational legal case. Active in the revolutions of 1848, he clashed repeatedly with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels while writing major works including Heraclitus the Obscure (1857) and The System of Acquired Rights (1861). In the early 1860s he broke with the liberal progressives during the Prussian constitutional conflict and launched a campaign for an independent working-class party, founding the General German Workers' Association in 1863 with a platform calling for state-aided producers' co-operatives won through universal suffrage. His strategy leaned on electoral politics and the state itself - he entered secret negotiations with Otto von Bismarck to forge an alliance between workers and the conservative Prussian government against the liberal bourgeoisie, a move his flamboyant, demagogic style made possible but also precarious. He was killed in a duel in August 1864, but the ADAV grew into a major force and merged with the Marxist Social Democratic Work