(Screen grab from the RT.com website, July 27th, 2025)
Most political philosophers have long accepted as a virtual truism that freedom and the rule of law are mutually dependent: you can’t have one without the other.
Of course, unjust laws are grounds for opposition, disobedience and even revolution, as theorists and activists from Thomas Aquinas to Dr. Martin Luther King also agree.
When legislation is coercive, overly intrusive or poorly-conceived, when its application is arbitrary or corrupt, it curtails or erases freedoms. Witness today’s totalitarian states.
But freedom and good laws are generally in symbiosis. As John Locke put it: "The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of laws, where there is no law, there is no freedom."
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