Locke Destroys Filmer With Facts and Logic
Everyone who studies undergraduate political philosophy already knows what Locke has to say in his Second Treatise on Government. But in this age of “reaction” videos, roasts, and “pwnage”, I think the polemics in Locke’s FIRST treatise are way more entertaining! It is, hands down, the longest objection screed I’ve read of the Enlightenment thinkers, apart from the responses to Descartes’ Meditations. The opening paragraphs had me in stitches: "…truly, I should have taken sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, as any other treatise, which would persuade all men that they are slaves, and ought to be so, for such another exercise of wit as was his who writ the encomium of Nero; rather than for a serious discourse, meant in earnest: had not the gravity of the title and epistle, the picture in the front of the book, and the applause that followed it, required me to believe that the author and publisher were both in earnest.