Justice & Law Quote by Karl Kraus

Kraus is needling the modern state’s favorite illusion: that human behavior becomes legible, manageable, and moral once it’s been processed into categories like guilt, innocence, and sentence length. The verb “squeeze” does the work of a whole political theory. It suggests not just regulation but distortion - a pressure that reshapes what it claims to contain. Then comes the kicker: crime “will appear.” Not necessarily increase, not necessarily erupt from some natural depravity, but materialize as a byproduct of the apparatus itself. The system doesn’t merely respond to wrongdoing; it helps manufacture the thing it needs to justify its own expansion.

The subtext is classic Kraus: contempt for bureaucratic language that pretends to be neutral while smuggling in violence. “Human nature” is messy, contradictory, often petty - the kind of chaos that satire loves because institutions can’t stand it. A “straitjacket” is both medical and punitive, implying that criminal justice borrows the authority of care to perform coercion. Once you force complex motives - poverty, desperation, pride, impulse, illness - through a narrow legal funnel, you get “crime” as a tidy product: a label, a record, a social identity.

Context matters. Kraus was writing in fin-de-siecle Vienna and the interwar years, watching a hyper-literate empire collapse into modern propaganda, mass politics, and technocratic policing. His point lands as a warning about administrative overreach: when law insists on being the master story of human conduct, it doesn’t eliminate disorder. It reframes life as pathology and produces offenders to match the diagnosis.