Filmer, Sir Robert

Abstract

Victim of John Locke’s late seventeenth-century searing attack aimed to dismantle his patriarchalist political ideas, Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) was for a long time considered the villain par excellence in the history of political thought. His works were seen as containing archaic, obsolete, and authoritarian principles. However, thanks to new scholarly approaches based on the methodology of contextualism, Filmer’s writings have been studied in connection with the polemics of the time during which they were composed. His political ideas have thus been analyzed as a powerful – even though in the long term unsuccessful – theoretical attempt to shape an absolutist vision of sovereignty at the center of which stands the king as father of the fatherland. This revisiting of Filmerian works has also cast light on his less-known tracts on important early modern issues such as theology, women and the household, witchcraft, and usury. Ultimately, Filmer has nowadays acquired a different – that is, finer – reputation as a thinker whose contribution to the history of ideas deserves a place only a level lower than that of high-caliber authors like Hobbes and his archenemy Locke.