Was the most influential political thinker of the seventeenth century actually a royalist absolutist?

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: While history remembers John Locke as the champion of modern governance, some scholars argue that his most famous work was merely an elaborate rebuttal to Sir Robert Filmer. Filmer, a staunch defender of the divine right of kings, insisted that political authority is simply an extension of fatherly power.

Sir Robert Filmer, a seventeenth-century English political theorist, argued that the government of a family by a father is the true origin and model of all political authority. In his seminal work, Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680, Filmer posited that God granted Adam absolute control over his descendants. This power, he claimed, was inherited by Noah and subsequently passed down to all kings and governors. Because this authority is divinely ordained, Filmer believed that a monarch is perfectly free from human control and cannot be bound by laws, as kings existed long before laws were ever created.

Filmer’s ideas were not merely abstract; they were deeply rooted in the political turmoil of his time. During the 1640s and 1650s, he wrote extensively against contemporary thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, and Hugo Grotius. He viewed democracy with deep suspicion, famously dismissing the ancient Athenian system as a 'justice-trading' mob rule. For Filmer, the safety of the kingdom was the chief law, and the public interest was always to be preferred over private concerns, managed by the wisdom of the ruler rather than the rigid constraints of legislation.

Though his works were often circulated in manuscript during his lifetime, Filmer’s influence became immense after his death. John Kenyon, a historian of British political debate, famously suggested that Filmer was the most influential thinker of his age, noting that without his provocations, the foundational texts of Locke and Algernon Sidney might never have been written. Even Jeremy Bentham later acknowledged that while Filmer failed to prove the divine right of kings, he successfully highlighted the 'physical impossibility' of absolute equality, arguing that subjection, rather than independence, is the natural state of humanity.

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