Justice & Law Quote by Ludwig Quidde

Security, for Quidde, is not a thicker wall or a bigger gun; it is a legal architecture sturdy enough to make violence feel unnecessary and illegitimate. Writing as a German pacifist and public critic who watched Europe treat diplomacy like seasonal theater, Quidde is staking a deliberately unromantic claim: peace won by power is temporary, peace won by rules can be made durable.

The phrasing is telling. "The security of which we speak" sounds like he is correcting a popular misuse of the word, pushing back against a security discourse that flatters militaries and budgets. He offers an alternative path: not goodwill, not moral awakening, but "development of international law" - slow, procedural, and institutional. That is the subtextual wager: the world will not behave better because leaders become wiser; it will behave better when incentives, norms, and enforcement mechanisms change what is rational.

Then comes the ideological fuse: "an international organization based on the principles of law and justice". Quidde is selling legitimacy as strategy. Law supplies predictability; justice supplies consent. Without justice, law is just an instrument of the strong. Without law, justice is just a slogan. His insistence on both reads like a rebuke to great-power clubs that call themselves guardians while carving up smaller states.

Context matters: Quidde lived through imperial brinkmanship, the collapse of the old order, and the faltering attempts at collective security between wars. The quote aims at the interwar dilemma: how to prevent the next catastrophe without pretending that national interests will simply dissolve. His answer is to domesticate power inside a system that can name aggression, arbitrate conflict, and make "security" something other than permanent mobilization.