Abstract

If laws restrict the liberty of citizens, they do not do so by taking away the capacity willingly to break the law; that is, they do not do so by removing our ability to will to do something contrary to the law and to succeed in so acting. They do not prevent or impede anybody’s motion. This much is set out explicitly by Hobbes: ‘generally all actions which men doe in Commonwealths, for feare of the law, are actions, which the doers had liberty to omit’. Laws themselves, clearly, do not make the prohibited act impossible in the way that chains, when effective, make action impossible: people break laws frequently though the laws remain in force. The nearest that laws could go to imposing external impediments to our actions would be to have the thought of the consequences create fear that determined our wills not to act in the prohibited manner. But fear and liberty are consistent, as in the case of the man who throws his goods overboard in the storm, because fear is internal to the person concerned and is not an external impediment to his action even if what causes the fear is external. The laws themselves do not constitute external impediments to motion in the way that chains do. We might yet be compelled to obey the law, and that is the point of the penalties imposed for breaking it. But Hobbes makes clear, especially by calling yet again on his example, that compulsion does not, in the important sense, remove liberty. Oakeshott’s suggestion that the liberty of citizens is restricted by the penalties of law-breaking in that they may be compelled to do what they do not want to do will therefore not suffice as an explanation of Hobbes’s artificial chains.