Liberty

Before reading about Liberty, I had no idea what it meant. I knew it was an important word but I could never wrap my head around the definition of the word. Now that I've read about it, I have quite a few thoughts on it. Firstly, the meaning of liberty. Montesquieu says that liberty is about living under laws that protect us from harm while leaving us free to do as much as possible. He also states that a government should separate their executive, legislative, and judicial powers of government so that the different bodies of power can check the other if they abuse their power. The reason for doing this is because if one person or body holds all the power, then there is a high chance that the person or body could abuse that power and become a tyrant. This was quite interesting to me as I had never considered the fact that power was shared between different forms of government in order to prevent any one power to abuse their power. It also makes me wonder what the first person to hold all this power did. Montesquieu also states that liberty requires the laws to concern only threats to public order and security. The laws should also be constructed to make it as easy as possible for citizens to protect themselves from punishment by not committing crimes. This was interesting to me as I didn't know that the laws were constructed in a way to make it easy for people to not commit crimes. I wonder how these laws were decided, especially back in the early days of civilization.