Justice & Law Quote by Max Stirner

Stirner’s line is a scalpel aimed at the state’s favorite magic trick: laundering force into legitimacy simply by naming it. “Violence” doesn’t disappear when it’s dressed up as “law”; it just gets a uniform, a seal, and a narrative about necessity. The sentence works because it flips the moral hierarchy we’re trained to accept. The state’s coercion is treated as a neutral backdrop - traffic stops, prisons, borders, taxes with penalties - while the individual’s coercion is pathologized as deviance. Stirner doesn’t deny that harm exists; he attacks the asymmetry in who gets to define harm.

The intent is less reformist than corrosive. Stirner isn’t lobbying for kinder policing; he’s questioning the conceptual monopoly that makes the state’s violence feel like order itself. “Calls” is doing heavy lifting: law is revealed as a label, a rhetorical act that converts one party’s power into everyone’s obligation. Subtext: if law is the state’s self-description, then legality is not an ethical category but a political one.

Context matters. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution and amid the 1840s German ferment, Stirner is reacting to modern liberalism’s promise that rights and constitutions tame power. He suspects they mostly rationalize it. The quote anticipates later critiques - Weber’s “monopoly on legitimate violence,” anarchist arguments about policing, even contemporary debates about protest vs. riot. It’s memorable because it refuses the comforting story that violence becomes nonviolent when authorized; it just becomes official.