Reception
Filmer's theory, owing to a timely posthumous publication, obtained a wide recognition. Nine years after the publication of Patriarcha, at the time of the Revolution which banished the Stuarts from the throne, John Locke singled out Filmer among the advocates of Divine Right and attacked him expressly in the first part of the Two Treatises of Government. The first Treatise goes into all his arguments seriatim, and especially pointing out that even if the first principles of his argument are to be taken for granted, the rights of the eldest born have been so often cast aside that modern kings can claim no such inheritance of authority, as Filmer asserts.
Filmer's patriarchal monarchism was also the target of Algernon Sydney in his Discourses Concerning Government and of James Tyrrell in his Patriarcha non monarcha.
Read more about this topic: Robert Filmer
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