I would say that Montesquieu's primary fear of the loss of
liberty resided in the structure of government. Being true to the Enlightenment,
Montesquieu approached the problem of freedom from an institutional point of view. His
argument was the freedom and liberty are in greater danger when government is only one
body through which all power flows. His solution was to create a government where
different bodies carried out different functions, with each being indispensable to the
other. This meant that freedom and liberty could be protected because power was divided
relatively equally amongst different branches. In this light, the structure of
government is what connects to liberty and freedom.
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