Robert Filmer

Robert Filmer

Robert Filmer was an English political theorist and royalist writer of the early Stuart period whose advocacy of hereditary monarchy and patriarchal authority provoked sustained debate during the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution. He is best known for his posthumously published Patriarcha and Other Political Treatises, which influenced and was attacked by contemporaries and later theorists in England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands. Filmer's arguments drew on Biblical exegesis, classical sources, and monarchical practice, and his work became a focal point in disputes between royalists and proponents of parliamentary sovereignty.

Life and Background

Filmer was born into a landed family in the county of Kent during the reign of Elizabeth I and lived through the reigns of James VI and I, Charles I, and the upheavals of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth of England. He matriculated at Christ's College, Cambridge and later associated with landed gentry networks in East Kent and Hertfordshire. Filmer served as a country gentleman rather than as a courtier, corresponding with figures in the royalist milieu such as supporters of Charles I and defenders of the Church of England. During the 1640s and 1650s his writings circulated among royalist intellectuals and opponents in London, Oxford, and among émigré communities in The Hague.

Political Philosophy and Major Works

Filmer's political theory centers on the doctrine of patriarchal sovereignty articulated most fully in his posthumous Patriarcha and Other Political Treatises, which engages with commentators on classical and Biblical authority, and that text explicitly responds to works by John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and other early modern theorists. He also authored pamphlets and shorter tracts addressing succession, legitimacy, and resistance, entering debate with pamphleteers from the Levellers, Presbyterians, and Parliamentarians. Filmer framed his arguments through appeals to figures such as Abraham, Adam, and biblical kings while juxtaposing their authority with the practices of historic monarchs like James I and dynastic claims associated with the Stuart dynasty. His method involved close readings of scriptural narratives alongside references to classical authors such as Aristotle, Plato, and Tacitus and to jurists like Sir Edward Coke.

Arguments for Patriarchy and Biblical Justification

Filmer defended absolute hereditary monarchy by adapting a patriarchalist model: he argued that political authority originates in the paternal authority of Adam granted by divine order, transmitted through descent to monarchs, and exemplified by patriarchs such as Abraham and by early kings of Israel like David. He maintained that royal obedience mirrors filial obedience within the household, invoking scriptural citations from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to legitimize monarchical prerogative and to counter notions of popular consent advanced by writers in London and Oxford. Filmer rejected social-contract accounts associated with Thomas Hobbes and later attributed to John Locke, insisting that ancient and Biblical precedent—including the reigns recounted in 1 Samuel and in the histories of Herodotus and Plutarch—supported hereditary rule. He also criticized parliamentary claims tied to the Magna Carta and to precedents in English law as misunderstandings of the original basis of sovereignty, drawing contrasts with commentators such as Hugo Grotius and Samuel Rutherford.

Criticisms and Responses (Contemporaries and Later Thinkers)

Filmer's essays provoked immediate rebuttals from republican and reformist writers active during the English Civil War, including pamphleteers aligned with Oliver Cromwell and critics in the Long Parliament. Prominent responses include systematic refutations in the work of John Locke, notably in Locke's Two Treatises of Government, which targeted Filmer's patriarchal claims and developed arguments for consent-based legitimacy and natural rights. Other critics included Richard Overton, Henry Parker, and Scottish Presbyterian theorists like Samuel Rutherford, who contested Filmer's scriptural readings and historical assertions. Continental thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza and Montesquieu engaged indirectly with Filmerian themes when addressing sovereignty, while later Victorian and Enlightenment historians in France, Germany, and the Netherlands reassessed Filmer's role in intellectual history. Filmer's reliance on biblical genealogies and his appeals to figures like Abraham and Jacob were challenged by exegetes, legal scholars such as William Blackstone, and republican historians steeped in classical studies.

Influence and Legacy

Although Filmer's immediate political project failed with the triumph of parliamentary authority and the settling of the Glorious Revolution, his writings shaped debate about sovereignty, monarchy, and the limits of political obligation across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Filmer became a principal foil for defenders of constitutionalism such as John Locke and reformers in Scotland and England, and his works were cited in polemical exchanges involving thinkers like David Hume and Edmund Burke. In modern scholarship, historians of political thought and legal history—working at institutions such as Oxford University, Cambridge University, and in archives holding Stuart manuscripts—situate Filmer within broader discussions of divine right of kings, patriarchal ideology, and the reception of Biblical authority in early modern politics. His texts continue to be studied in relation to debates about monarchy during the Restoration and the development of constitutional doctrine leading into the Enlightenment.

Category:17th-century English writers Category:English political philosophers Category:Stuart period