Justice & Law Quote by Ferdinand Lassalle

Lassalle is doing something deceptively simple here: stripping the state of its halo and presenting it as machinery. Judges, clerks, administrators - the people we’re trained to imagine as neutral referees - become "organized instruments of power", not because they’re individually corrupt, but because their roles are built to execute a social order. The phrase "in certain societies" is the sly hinge. It signals that these arrangements aren’t natural or inevitable; they’re historically contingent. If the social structure changes, the apparatus of justice and administration changes with it, because it exists to manage that structure’s conflicts and property relations.

The intent is polemical, but also pedagogical. "You will understand by yourselves" flatters the listener into complicity, as if the conclusion is obvious once you stop treating law as sacred text. Lassalle is speaking from the mid-19th-century crucible of European industrialization, when new working-class movements were learning that formal rights didn’t automatically translate into real power. Liberal constitutions promised equality; courts and bureaucracies often enforced the opposite, protecting capital and policing labor under the banner of order.

Subtext: don’t get distracted by the theater of impartiality. The law’s legitimacy relies on appearing above politics, yet its personnel are organized, funded, and tasked in ways that align with whoever governs. Lassalle isn’t just critiquing officials; he’s warning reformers that swapping leaders without changing institutions leaves the power structure intact, merely better staffed.