POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY mainlands Montesquieu’s own preference, however, is for monarchy, and particularly the ‘mixed monarchy’ he discerned in England The feature that Montesquieu admired in the British Constitution, and that found its way into the American Constitution, was the principle of the separation of powers After the revolution of 1688 Parliament had achieved sole legislative power, while leaving in practice considerable executive discretion to the king’s ministers, and judges became very largely free of governmental interference There was not—and is not to this day—to be found in British constitutional law any explicit statement that the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government should not be combined in a single person or institution, or any formulated theory of checks and balances Nonetheless, Montesquieu’s benign interpretation of the Hanoverian system, in which the power of a sovereign’s ministers essentially depended on the consent of Parliament, had a lasting inXuence on constitution makers in many parts of the world The separation of powers was important, Montesquieu believed, because it provided the best bulwark against tyranny and the best guarantee of the liberty of the subject What, then, is liberty? ‘Liberty’, Montesquieu replies, ‘is a right of doing whatever the laws permit’ (EL XI.3) Is that all, we may wonder; doesn’t a citizen of a tyranny enjoy that much freedom? We must Wrst remember that for Montesquieu a despot ruled not by law but by decree: only an instrument created by an independent legislature counts as a law Secondly, in many countries, including the France of Montesquieu’s own time, citizens have often been at risk of arbitrary arrest for actions that were perfectly legal but were regarded as oVensive by those in power Montesquieu oVered another, more substantial, deWnition of liberty It does not consist in freedom from all restraint, but ‘in the power of doing what we ought to will and in not being constrained to what we ought not to will’ (EL XI.3) This link between liberal social institutions and an idealized form of the individual will was developed into a substantial political theory by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Social Contract Rousseau and the General Will When Rousseau begins by saying ‘Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains,’ those who have read his earlier works on the corrupting eVect 295