ABSTRACT
The problem of conflicting jurisdictions was the most serious flaw which Filmer’s critics detected in his work. But in order to present a successful alternative to the assimilation of household and body politic, three broader themes had to be addressed. It was Locke who devoted himself most thoroughly to this task.1 The first area of concern was that Filmer and Natural Law theorists shared a proprietary model of personal and material resources, which could be used to dispossess human beings completely. If this outcome is undesirable, the proprietary model must be revised. The second was the relationship between divine will and human reason. For Locke, God is necessary if we wish to defend the existence of a non-conventional social order. But does it have to be the god of the patriarchalists? What is the role left for human reason? What is the proper interweaving of nature and convention? And the third theme regarded the question of whether egalitarian assumptions must entail antagonistic relations in the state of nature.
