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FILMER’S POSITION ON POLITICAL POWER - Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government [1698]

Edition used:

Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund 1996).

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


FILMER’S POSITION ON POLITICAL POWER

Why should one obey the law? In pre-Christian times, the answer most often given was: The gods gave us our laws. The gods of the ancient polis were the gods of a particular political community. As a religion for all mankind, however, the Christian faith endorsed no particular legal code. The things of Caesar were not the things of God. As a practical matter, Roman Catholicism did support governments by giving them its sanction. But the universal claim of the Church undercut the authority of politics and, consequently, there was endless rivalry between priests and kings.

The Protestant Reformation solved that problem by overthrowing the political pretensions not only of the Pope but of all clergy. But if the Church no longer sanctified country and law, what did? England wrestled with this question for a century and a half after Henry VIII declared his religious independence from Rome in 1532. The question was theoretical, but the consequences were bloody. Men of good will sought a principled answer in authoritative books, practical experience, and through their own reasonings. In the end it was settled by force of arms.

Most of Protestant England believed unquestioning obedience to the king was not only the old but the best way. The view that the king has a divine right to rule that comes directly from God seemed to provide “the only means, which could preserve the civil, from being swallowed by the ecclesiastical powers.”4 In its traditional, pre-Filmer form, the divine right claim was qualified by the requirement that the king must obey the laws and customs of the kingdom.

But the logic of divine right did not stop there. If the king alone has his authority from God, why should there be any limit on what he might do? This radical conclusion was drawn by Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha defends absolute monarchical power, no matter how lawless, cruel, or tyrannical it might be. Like other royalists, Filmer argued on the basis of the Bible as well as of experience and reason unassisted by faith. Unlike other royalists, Filmer liberated his king from all earthly restraint.5

Filmer maintained in Patriarcha that kings rule by right of birth. They inherit this right ultimately from Adam, to whom God gave sovereign power over the world. Men are born neither free nor equal. He thought monarchy the most natural form of government because it is based on the most natural of all relations, the family, in which the father rules. Both the natural law and the Bible, Filmer says, teach us to obey our parents. A king is a father writ large, patriarch of his country. Therefore, the king is not subject to any human law, including even the English common law. He is himself the source of law.

Filmer’s radicalization of the theory of royalism might have been harmless enough had practical developments in England not made the threat of absolute monarchy quite real. The old nobility had entirely lost its former armed strength.6 There was evidence that King Charles II and his brother, the future James II, were trying to impose upon England a government modeled on Louis XIV’s France: state Catholicism with no Parliament. (Filmer himself, an Anglican, was strongly anti-Catholic, to be sure.) Unchecked by the nobles or by Parliament, the government threatened to become more absolute than any medieval monarchy.

A revolutionary ferment was occasioned by this threat, and in the early 1680s three Whig writers wrote books attacking Filmer: James Tyrrell’s Patriarcha non Monarcha was published in 1681; John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government appeared in 1689 and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government in 1698.

[4]The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 1, p. 120, from Wilson’s 1790–91 lectures on Law.

[5]On pre- and post-Christian political obligation, Harry V. Jaffa, Original Intent and the Framers of the U.S. Constitution (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1994), pp. 313–317. On Filmer and English royalist writing, Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), ch. 2, and Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), ch. 1.

[6]Addressed in Discourses Concerning Government, ch. 3, section 37.