Free from the law, or free through the law?
On the axis: Political liberty · the law
Every law takes something from what I may do; where laws fall silent, I do as I please. Yet without law the weak are at the mercy of the strong, and a people gives itself laws precisely to be free. Does law limit freedom, protect it, or constitute it?
Justification
If power is but a trust received to preserve natural rights, then it is bounded by its very end: it cannot reach beyond the common good, nor rule by arbitrary decrees, nor tax without consent. Locke derives from this the institutional arrangement (supremacy of the legislative, separation of powers) and, above all, the consequence refused: a ruler who betrays the trust puts himself in a state of war with the people, who thereby recover a right of resistance. Far from opening the door to disorder, this right is the last guarantee against tyranny, the judge being none other than the wronged people.
Two Treatises of Government, II, ch. 18-19 (of tyranny and the dissolution of government)
Justification
Liberty is not the absence of hindrance or the right to do anything, but obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself: a positive liberty, the autonomy of the citizen. Civil man exchanges his natural independence for moral liberty, the only kind that truly makes him master of himself. This is why whoever refuses to obey the , Rousseau writes in a formidable phrase, shall be « forced to be free ».
The impulse of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.The Social Contract, I, 8
Rousseau, The Social Contract, I, 7-8
Anchors: Hobbes · Locke · Rousseau
leads to: Relation to authority