Word: filmer
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That formulation was crucial; it signified at least the intellectual end of the era epitomized by King Louis XIV of France: "L'etat, c'est moi." Locke carried Tyrrell's idea much farther in his Two Treatises of Government, written partly as a refutation of Filmer and published just after the revolution in 1688. In the Second Treatise, Locke based all political theory upon a rationally ordered universe. The thought was not impiously secular but in fact was the re-verse?a conception of human order deriving entirely from the infinite and infinitely discoverable mind of God. Yet, in effect...
...feudalism had bound lord to vassal as well as vassal to lord, apologists for the ever mightier monarchs of Europe increasingly used "right reason" to interpret God's will as a mandate for the divine right of kings?a sacred and descending chain of authority. In 1680, Sk Robert Filmer's Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings expressed this idea according to a metaphor of relative power: "Kings are as absolute as Adam over the creatures." A king, thought Filmer, rules his people as a father rules ins children. In 1681, the writer James Tyrrell, a friend of Locke...