political liberty

Ariela Kluk

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

02/02/21

Liberty

One of the greatest philosophers of Liberalism is Montesquieu, and his definition of political liberty is a feeling of safety. An example that he used was that if everyone can do whatever they want then we can hurt other people, but if we can hurt other people that means other people can hurt us and that would not give us political liberty. Liberty gives us rules and laws that we have to follow to keep ourselves safe without taking away our freedom. We still have the freedom to do as many things as we can without disobeying the laws. So as long as we follow the laws there will be no issues with the state and we will be safe. At least that is the idea. The laws are also made as simple as possible so that the citizens understand what they can and cannot do to keep themselves safe. The people who provide us these laws for liberty are the government, and the government has a lot of power. To ensure that they do not abuse their power, we have three different branches that can check each other, so that these laws don’t just go through one person, they instead go through the three different powers of government. These three powers are the legislative branch, judicial branch, and executive branch. Countries that only have one person in charge and not multiple have nothing stopping the one person in charge from making a mistake leaving the citizens with no trust in their own security and safety. 

Montesquieu believed that these three powers should have their own jobs, each one should have their one thing to do and the other power should check it before being confirmed. Liberty only has to do with safety in public, it has nothing to do with religion or other unnecessary things in life. Liberty should only be able to prevent things that it needs to prevent.  It is also crucial that the laws of liberty are not made unfairly, this means that it should not be a crime to do certain things that can happen accidentally. If such simple things in life, for example bumping into a statue were considered a crime then no one would be able to obey these laws, which would leave all citizens unsafe because no one would be following the laws. The last thing that is necessary for liberty is that these laws need to be as simple as possible for innocent people to prove themselves innocent. There are lots of steps to liberty, but these laws are necessary to keep our people safe. 

I definitely agree with Montesquieu, and that we need these laws for political liberty.  I think that if we did not have these laws for crime, our world would be a mess. Having evidence is also a big part of this because you cannot prove that someone did a crime without evidence. Nowadays we have voice recordings, cameras, fingerprints, and other things that help provide evidence. I think that crimes are being controlled, but there are definitely still crimes happening in the world. Overall I think that political liberty is very important for safety, and I agree with all of Montesquieu’s points. 

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