The First Treatise of Government

In Patriarcha and elsewhere, Sir Robert Filmer argues that monarchical authority is derived from fatherly authority, that God vested monarchical authority in Adam, and that this authority descended to Adam’s heirs by the principle of fatherhood. Locke devotes large portions of First Treatise to refuting these arguments.

The first problem with fatherhood is that Filmer never explains its relevance to political authority. Locke therefore describes Filmer’s fatherhood as “this strange kind of domineering phantom” (7) that somehow attaches itself to every figure, Biblical or otherwise, who acquires absolute power. Anticipating the obvious objection that Adam was not a father at creation and therefore could not have been absolute monarch of the world by right of fatherhood, Filmer insists that Adam nonetheless had the possibility of becoming a father and therefore was a monarch “in habit” (21) before siring any heirs. Locke devotes two full pages to mocking this argument, which makes Adam, he asserts, “no king at all” (23).

A more serious analysis follows from Filmer’s claim that Adam enjoyed “private dominion, by donation” over the world (25). Locke refutes this claim by citing Biblical passages that show Eve’s equal share in dominion: “a joint grant to two” (33). Likewise, Filmer insists that God’s curse placed Eve in subjection, but Locke notes that it could not have elevated Adam, for “he too had his share in the fall” (50), so it would be absurd to conclude that God’s wrath upon both rewarded one of them by making Adam absolute monarch of the world. Based on this and other Biblical passages, Locke concludes that “God [. . .] gives not, that I see, any authority to Adam over Eve” (53).

Locke maintains this line of analysis in considering the relationship between parents and children. Whereas Filmer attempts to establish the father’s absolute authority in the act of conception, Locke notes that “the mother cannot be denied an equal share in begetting of the child, and so the absolute authority of the father will not arise from hence” (63). In trying to adapt the Decalogue to his own political purposes, Filmer excludes the phrase “and mother” from the commandment to “honor thy father and mother” (68). Furthermore, not only does the Bible instruct children to honor both parents, it is also clear from the text that neither parent has the power to absolve children of this responsibility as pertains to the other, in which case “this command of God gives the father no sovereignty, no supremacy” (72) in comparison to the mother.

Finally, having dispensed with Filmer’s arguments for Adam’s dominion over Eve and a father’s absolute power over his children, Locke returns to the political relationship between fatherhood and authority. Again, he finds none. If magistrates, for instance, possess all fatherly authority, and if fatherly authority is absolute as Filmer describes it, then “the subjects, though fathers, can have no power over their children,” for fatherly authority “cannot be all in another’s hands, and a part remain with the parents” (74). Since absolute authority is indivisible, a father and a son cannot possess it at the same time, even if the son has children of his own, for in this case there would be “two absolute unlimited powers existing together” (81). Finally, the “authority of fatherhood,” as Filmer conceives of it, “could not descend to, nor be inherited by, his next heir,” so it is meaningless as a source of political authority (118).

In short, Locke concludes that Scripture itself, which is Filmer’s lone source for the presumed connection between fatherhood and absolute monarchy, in fact proves the opposite in every possible respect.