Comment on the assertion of Laslett that Filmer and not Hobbes was the main antagonist of Locke. (2013, 15 Marks)
For two centuries John Locke‘s Two Treatises of Government was read as the liberal answer to Thomas Hobbes, limited government against absolutism, both built on contract. Peter Laslett, who edited Sir Robert Filmer‘s Patriarcha (1949) and then produced the critical edition of the Two Treatises (1960), argued that Locke’s real adversary was Filmer. He is right about Locke’s target and occasion, less so at the level of theory.
Laslett’s Case
- Dating. The Treatises were written largely in 1679–80, during the Exclusion Crisis over the succession of the Catholic James, Duke of York, revised in Dutch exile and published anonymously in 1689. In Laslett’s phrase, they are an Exclusion Tract, not a Revolution Pamphlet.
- Occasion. Filmer (d. 1653) wrote Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings before 1642. Printed by the Tories in 1680, it argued that God gave Adam dominion, that kings inherit it as fathers of their people, and that men are born unfree.
- Text. The First Treatise refutes Patriarcha passage by passage. The Second opens by recalling that Adam had no authority by natural right of fatherhood, or by positive donation from God. Filmer is named throughout, Hobbes nowhere, save one allusion to the mighty Leviathan (§98).
- Company. James Tyrrell (Patriarcha non Monarcha, 1681) and Algernon Sidney (Discourses Concerning Government) also answered Filmer.
- Doctrine. Locke’s core claims answer patriarchalism: men are born free and equal, paternal power is shared with the mother and ends at adulthood, and rule rests on consent.
Why Hobbes Remains the Deeper Antagonist
- Shared method, opposite conclusion. Filmer never argued from contract, so Locke’s attack on contractual absolutism cannot be aimed at him. Locke rejects the confusion of the state of nature with the state of war that some men have confounded (§19). His men who guard against polecats or foxes but accept being devoured by lions (§93) mock the Hobbesian sovereign.
- Prudence. Leviathan carried the taint of atheism; refuting Filmer answered the Tories without the danger of naming Hobbes.
- Filmer paired them himself. His Observations on Leviathan (1652) accepted Hobbes’s account of sovereign rights and rejected only his account of how sovereignty is acquired. Any argument against absolute power struck both.
- Rival readings. Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History, 1953) read Locke as a cautious Hobbesian; C. B. Macpherson (1962) made both theorists of possessive individualism.
- Method. Laslett’s contextualism, carried on by John Dunn and Quentin Skinner, recovers the occasion but can mistake the polemical target for the conceptual opponent.
Indian Illustration
India’s Preamble grounds authority in We, the People, and the 26th Amendment (1971) ended the princes’ privy purses: Filmer’s birthright is dead. The Hobbes–Locke question, security against liberty, is not: ADM Jabalpur (1976) and the 44th Amendment replayed it.
Conclusion
Laslett settled the date, the occasion and the declared enemy. But the Two Treatises defeats two absolutisms, Filmer’s by consent against birthright and Hobbes’s by trust against an unaccountable sovereign. Filmer was Locke’s antagonist in polemic; Hobbes remained his antagonist in theory.