Reviews

REVIEWS Patriarcha and other political writings of Sir Robert Filmer. Edited by Peter Laslett. Blackwell, Oxford, 1949, pp. 326, 12s. 6d. Sm ROBERT FILM.ER, the eldest son of Sir Edward Filmer, was born in or about the year 1588 at East Sutton Park, where he spent the greater part of his life, succeeding to his father's estate in 1629, and dying there in 1653. To Kent people the name Filmer is well known, and the family connection with East Sutton lasted until the twentieth century. To others the name, if known at all, is known as that of the author against whom Locke wrote his First Treatise on Government, wherein "the false principles and foundation of Sir Robert Filmer and his followers are detected and overthrown." The number of people who have read Locke's or Sidney's refutation of Filmerism vastly exceeds the number of those who have any first-hand acquaintance with Filmer's own work. Patriarcha, his major work, was published posthumously in 1680 and republished in 1685, but not again until 1884, and then in an unsatisfactory edition. This new edition, which Mr. Laslett has prepared with careful but by no means laboured scholarship is from a previously unknown manuscript which he discovered at East Sutton Park in 1939. Its publication was certainly needed to fill a lacuna in seventeenth century English political writing. Filmer, like other country gentlemen of the first half of the seventeenth century-including his friend Sir Roger Twysden-was exercised about problems of government. He was a Royalist, although not active in the Civil War. His treatise, Patria1·cha, which was designed to show the absolute nature of monarchy, based on the proposition of descent from Adam, the first King, was written in 1630, but it was not until 1680, at the time of the Exclusion Bill debate, that the new Tory party, being in need of a statement of political philosophy, revived Filmer's work, and it a-ppeared for the first time in print. Locke, in his answer, had little difficulty in disposing of the positive part of Filmer's doctrine, but he failed to meet Filmer's criticisms of the "social contract" theory, and indeed Locke's account "Of the Beginning of Political Societies " contains matter that is scarcely less fantastic than the views for which Filmer argued. His argument is utterly strange to twentieth century ways of thought, but Filmer does not deserve the reputation for stupidity that has been put upon him by subsequent refuters, of whom, as Mr. Laslett says," none, or almost none . . . have known exactly who Sir Robert Filmer was, when he lived, what he did, and what he wrote." At last he has been fixed in his historical context. 153 REVIEWS This volume contains also several other of Sir Robert Filmer's writings, including his Observations on Aristotle's Politics, on Hobbes' Leviathan, and on Grotius' De Jure Belli et Pacis. Mr. Laslett's Introduction is well worth the attention of anyone_ interested in seventeenth century Kent, whether or not he is particularly concerned with contemporary political argument. Filmer was not a great thinker, nor perhaps a particularly attractive character, but we are indebted to Mr. Laslett for rescuing him from the unjust contempt and obscurity beneath which he has been buried for nearly three centuries. FRANK JESSUP. Survey and Policy of Field Re.search in tlie Arch