Quote of the Day: Charles de Montesquieu on Justice & Law

In the early 1740s, when European courts bargained over borders and power, and the War of the Austrian Succession was tightening its grip, thinkers of the Enlightenment were asking a more radical question: what makes authority legitimate in the first place? That argument hasn’t cooled; it’s resurfaced in 2026 wherever emergency powers linger, courts are politicized, and “freedom” is reduced to a slogan. Against that backdrop, Charles de Montesquieu offers a deliberately bracing definition: “Liberty is the right to do what the law permits.”

At first pass, the line can sound like a tidy excuse for obedience. But Montesquieu isn’t praising rule-following; he’s warning that liberty without structure collapses into domination, by the strong, the loud, or the armed. In a society where anything goes, the vulnerable don’t get more freedom; they get fewer options, fewer protections, and more fear. The law, at its best, is the fence that keeps one person’s appetite from becoming another person’s prison.

There’s a second edge to his claim. If liberty depends on law, then the quality of the law becomes the whole ballgame. Just laws are predictable, general, and applied evenly; they draw bright lines that let people plan their lives. Bad laws are arbitrary, weaponized, or selectively enforced, and they convert “permission” into a leash. Montesquieu’s sentence is therefore a test: if the law makes freedom smaller rather than safer, the problem isn’t the citizen’s desire, it’s the state’s design.

Charles de Montesquieu, a central architect of modern political philosophy, spent his career dissecting how institutions shape behavior and how power can be restrained without chaos. His Enlightenment legacy rests on a practical insistence: durable liberty requires rules strong enough to bind rulers, not just the ruled.

February begins with a useful civic reset: review the rules you live under, the rules you enforce, and the shortcuts you excuse. Treat law as a public promise, demand clarity, demand fairness, and practice leadership that refuses both anarchy and authoritarian comfort.