The year 1698 saw the publication of John Locke's Two Treatises of Government, an enormously influential work in the development of liberalism in England and elsewhere; in France and America classical liberal movements even led to revolutions. Written in the context of the Exclusion Crisis, with a probable date of composition of 1679–80, the Two Treatises demanded the Glorious Revolution that came to pass in 1688. Peter Laslett has shown that rather than a critique of Hobbes, as scholars have long assumed, Locke's Two Treatises has as its primary target the patriarchalism of Robert Filmer. As a client of Lord Shaftesbury and a polemicist for the Whig party, Locke was involved in the attempt to exclude the Catholic James II from succeeding to the throne. In support of James and hereditary succession Tories circulated Filmer's Patriarcha in manuscript. Whigs had to respond to patriarchalist theory as Filmer's 1630s treatise and his ideas of patriarchalism gained a new afterlife in the Revolutionary politics of the 1680s.

In refuting Filmer, Locke attacked the family-state analogy itself, breaking the analogy in order to make his argument for social contract and the natural freedom of men. Because the fifth commandment is so central to Filmer's thought, Locke first assaults the scriptural basis of Filmer's patriarchal argument by reinserting the female gender into Filmer's use of the commandment in the account of the origins of society.