Montesquieu · Politics
Montesquieu’s vision of freedom in the modern world: liberty as security under law rather than the power to do anything; commerce as a softening, civilising, peace-making force; and moderation as the master art of free government.
Before Montesquieu can tell us what political liberty is, he insists on clearing away a confusion he thought fatal - the popular but mistaken idea that liberty means doing whatever one wishes. No word, he observed, has been given so many different meanings as “liberty,” and the most seductive and dangerous of them is the notion that to be free is to be unconstrained, to follow one’s own will without limit.
This, Montesquieu argued, is precisely not political liberty - and confusing the two destroys freedom rather than securing it. In a society, if everyone could do whatever they pleased, no one would be safe, for others could do as they pleased to you: liberty as boundless licence dissolves into the war of all against all, in which the strong dominate and no one is secure. True political liberty, far from being the absence of law, exists only under law. To be politically free is to have the right to do whatever the laws permit - and to be protected by those same laws from being forced to do what they do not require, or being harmed at the whim of another. Liberty lives inside the boundary of law, not outside it; the law is not the enemy of freedom but its very condition.
Having said what liberty is not, Montesquieu gives it a positive definition that is one of the most quietly profound in all of political thought. Political liberty, he says, is a tranquillity of mind - the calm that comes from each person’s confident sense of his own safety. To be free is, above all, to feel secure: to know that you will not be arbitrarily arrested, that you will not be harmed at the caprice of the powerful, that the law and not some person’s will determines what may be done to you.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned Montesquieu’s precise definition of political liberty and his theory of “gentle commerce.” Explain in your own words what liberty meant for him, and why he thought commerce tends to civilise and pacify.
Leads to Alexis de Tocqueville.
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