Cesare Cuttica. Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the Patriotic Monarch: Patriarchalism in Seventeenth-Century Political Thought.

Abstract

Despite more than 60 years of continual if sporadic scholarly attention, Sir Robert Filmer remains relatively unknown beyond the facts that his writings, especially Patriarcha (1680), were the targets of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government (1690) and that he defended divine-right absolutism with a theory that rooted monarchical authority in the God-given patriarchal power of Adam. And even where he is known, he is rarely taken seriously. In this strikingly thorough, richly documented, innovative, and informative book, Cesare Cuttica seeks to rehabilitate Filmer. Using the modes of intellectual biography and a language/vocabulary approach to historical political thought (that is not quite “Cambridge School” but which is not overtly discussed), Cuttica begins by situating Filmer squarely within the contexts of the early- to mid-seventeenth-century political controversies and theoretical debates to which he contributed and in terms of which he was initially read (part I). Cuttica then examines the post-Restoration controversies that posthumously provided Filmer with his modern reputation—such that it is—when Patriarcha was published for the first time and his other works were reissued (part II). In the process, Cuttica revises (when he does not reject) the interpretations of his small band of predecessors, primarily Peter Laslett, James Daly, and myself—all of whom sought to contextualize Filmer's writings in various ways—and extends the scholarship of Margaret Ezell and Johann Sommerville, Filmer's most recent editors. (On a more personal note, I am pleased both to be corrected and that a work I published nearly 40 years ago still commands attention.) Although Filmer remains a person of some secondary intellectual and political consequence, Cuttica's reevaluation assures him a new and secure place in the history of early modern British political thought.