Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

A deceptively modest definition of freedom, this line is Montesquieu smuggling restraint into the romance of liberty. He doesn’t praise liberty as boundless self-expression; he drafts it as a legal condition. The provocation is that liberty isn’t the absence of limits but the presence of the right limits, publicly known and evenly applied. In a century when monarchs treated law as an extension of their will, tying liberty to what “the laws permit” is less submissive than it sounds: it shifts authority from personal power to a system.

The subtext is an argument against the popular shortcut that confuses freedom with license. If liberty means doing whatever you want, then the strongest people get the most liberty, because they can bully, hoard, and dominate. Montesquieu’s version, by contrast, depends on a shared framework that protects the weak from the whims of the strong. Laws, in this view, are not the enemy of freedom; arbitrariness is. That’s why the phrasing matters: not “whatever rulers permit,” but “whatever the laws permit,” implying laws that are stable, general, and not tailored to punish enemies.

Context sharpens the edge. Montesquieu is one of the architects of modern constitutional thinking, obsessed with how power corrupts when it concentrates. This sentence quietly presumes his larger project: separation of powers, checks and balances, and a political culture where law governs the governors. It also contains a warning for democracies: if laws can be made impulsively, vindictively, or by captured institutions, “law” becomes a costume for oppression. The quote works because it’s both a definition and a test: you can measure a society’s liberty by whether its laws are fair enough to deserve obedience.