Justice & Law Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

A neat little sentence that flatters the liberal imagination while quietly putting it on a leash. Montesquieu defines liberty not as the absence of constraint but as life inside a framework sturdy enough to keep power predictable. The line works because it refuses the romantic version of freedom as pure self-expression; instead, it treats freedom as a legal achievement, something engineered. If you can do what the law permits, you’re not “free” because you’re untethered, you’re free because you’re protected from arbitrary whims - especially the whims of rulers.

The subtext is a warning aimed at two audiences. To monarchs (and their modern equivalents), it implies: if your laws are merely your moods written down, then “liberty” becomes a cruel joke. To citizens intoxicated by the idea that freedom means doing whatever you want, it insists: that’s not liberty, that’s volatility, and volatility invites a strongman “to restore order.” Montesquieu’s definition is conservative in the best sense: it distrusts sudden concentrations of authority and sudden surges of popular passion alike.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of absolutist France and admiring aspects of the English constitutional model, Montesquieu is building the intellectual scaffolding for separation of powers. “What the law permits” only safeguards liberty if law itself is constrained - by institutions, by checks, by norms that make legislation more than a mask for force. The sentence is short because it’s meant to be portable, almost bureaucratic. That’s the point: liberty, for Montesquieu, is not a feeling. It’s a system.