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Twentieth-century political scientists know Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653), an English absolutist theorist and perhaps the most famous proponent of the theory of patriarchies during the seventeenth century, primarily in his capacity as the target of John Locke’s criticisms in the Two Treatises of Government. Eldest son of Sir Edward Filmer of East Sutton, Kent, Robert Filmer entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1604.

After a year at Trinity, Filmer was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn to study law, although it is not clear whether he ever actually did so. He married Anne Heton in 1618 and inherited his family’s estates upon Sir Edward’s death in 1629.

By the time that the English Civil War (1642–1651; armed conflict between Parliament and King Charles I) broke out in 1642, Filmer—although a fervent supporter of the king—was too old to take an active part in the fighting. Remaining at his family estate, he was forced to contribute to the parliamentarian cause when Kent fell to Parliament and was imprisoned for a time during the mid-1640s. Three important works by Filmer appeared in 1648: The Freeholder’s Grand Inquest, a historical survey that argued that Parliament sat at the king’s pleasure; The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy, which attacked parliamentary supporter Philip Hunton’s Treatise of Monarchie (1643); and The Necessity of the Absolute Power of All Kings, which reproduced excerpts from Richard Knolles’s 1606 translation of French sovereignty theorist Jean Bodin into English. With the execution of the king in January 1649, Filmer retreated from public life, although he did remain informed about the political and intellectual currents of his time. Filmer’s Observations upon Aristotle’s Politiques—a critique of Hobbes, Milton, and Grotius—appeared in 1652, one year before his death.

Filmer’s best-known work, Patriarcha, was written around 1628 but remained in manuscript form until its publication in 1680, at which time it was celebrated by resurgent Anglican royalists and denounced in print by no less than three important Whig thinkers: Locke, James Tyrell is his Patriarcha, Non Monarcha (1681), and Algernon Sidney is his Discourses Concerning Government (1698). In Patriarcha, he took aim at such Catholic thinkers as Robert Bellarmine and Adolfo Suarez, who had criticized the Crown’s requirement that English Catholics take oaths of allegiance in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. More broadly, however, Patriarcha attacked contract theories of political obligation, which claimed a right on the part of the people actively to resist the king, and denounced defenses of Parliament that sought to limit or extract concessions from the king. In distinct contrast to his most famous critic, John Locke, Filmer equated political power and paternal power and denied the natural freedom of humankind. In other words, just as a father possessed absolute authority over his family, the king possessed absolute authority over all the families in the kingdom. Just as every individual was born subject to the head of his or her family, so was everyone born subject to a political ruler.

Bibliography:

Daly, James. Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1979.
Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Schochet, Gordon J. Patriarchalism and Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth century England. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
Sommerville, Johann P., ed. Patriarcha and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.