FILMER's JUDGEMENT

Everything is somehow already said in this assessment from Filmer. In order to take account of his reading of Hobbes's politics, it is thus necessary to elucidate this paradox that makes him approve the edifice while condemning the foundation, that is to say, retain the doctrine of the rights of sovereignty while rejecting the theory of institution that subtends it. Can the Hobbesian concept of sovereignty preserve the same content when we separate it from the concepts of natural right and social contract in order to replace it within a doctrine that makes of the ‘right of fatherhood’ the foundation for ‘royal authority’? Thus formulated, the question calls for a negative response: the concept of sovereignty is evidently bound to the doctrinal framework within which it is constructed. Sovereignty according to Bodin is not identical to sovereignty according to Filmer, and the latter is not identical to sovereignty according to Hobbes. Certainly, there are numerous and real convergences between Filmer and Hobbes, to which we will return, but there are also some fundamental divergences which affect the content of the concept of sovereignty and explain the incommensurate posterity of their works. This double relation between Filmer and Hobbes can be truly understood only if we perceive the existence of an important differentiation in the work of the second: there are not one but, in a sense, two theories of sovereignty's foundation in Hobbes. Yet these two theories are supposed to agree with an identical definition of sovereignty's rights. It is a question of the distinction between the concepts of regnum patrimoniale and regnum institutivum. The Filmerian critique of Hobbes is going to consist in privileging the first against the second, that is to say, in opposing Hobbes to himself. What is the value of this critique? Is the double foundation of sovereignty in Hobbes internalised in a splitting of the concept of sovereignty?