A word about Robert Filmer. His name makes an occasional appearance in this blog, mostly in contexts in which I'm warning about abuse of, or excessive claims for, supreme executive power. I noticed years ago that many libertarians invoke Thomas Hobbes in contexts like that. The dangerous proposed new regulation or evidentiary privilege is "Hobbesian," gasps the writer. I generally agreed that it -- whatever had provoked this outburst on a given day -- is a bad thing, but I grew tired of the ritual invocations of Hobbes there, especially where they didn't fit all that well. After all, Hobbes was a very secular thinker. He was wary of religion because in his own lifetime he had seen religious fervor lead to an open challenge to the sovereign, and he had seen THAT challenge lead to a civil war that must have looked a bit like a war of "all against all" to him. He was a member of the Church of England, but he clearly explained that he was so because his ...
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My recent reading includes large helpings of Philippa Gregory's latest, THREE SISTERS, THREE QUEENS (2016), another of her fictionalized takes on love and betrayal among the royals of Renaissance Europe. In this book, the focus is on the early Tudor dynasty, and especially on Margaret Tudor, the eldest daughter of Henry VII, founder thereof, and the older sister of the future Henry VIII. Margaret became Queen of Scotland with an arranged marriage to James IV. She reigned and ruled under the title of Dowager Queen after James' death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. So who, you ask, were the other two sisters of the novel's title? One is Margaret's blood sister, Mary Tudor, who was known as one of the great beauties of the age. Mary was the inspiration for the name her brother Henry gave to his older daughter. More important for Gregory's story, she wed the King of France (Louis XII) in 1514, and Anne Boleyn served as her maid of honor at that ceremony. The t...
With no small content I read Mr. Hobbes’ book De Cive , and his Leviathan , about the rights of sovereignty, which no man, that I know hath so amply and judiciously handled. I consent with him about the rights of exercising government, but I cannot agree to his means of acquiring it. It may seem strange that I should praise his building and yet mislike his foundation, but so it is. That was Robert Filmer, the divine-right-of-kings theorist, apologist for the whims of the Stuart family. I take the quote from Yves Charles Zarka's book about Hobbes, newly translated into English by James Griffith. Griffith also contributes an introduction, stressing that though Leo Strauss is "to some degree an ally of Zarka's in the argument against historicism, they are not involved in identical projects." I have a full review of Zarka's book in a forthcoming issue of The Federal Lawyer. I go into more particulars about the Filmer/Hobbes contrast there, as ...