Del gobernante divino al dirigente paterno

Abstract

This article studies the mythical and religious argument of political paternalism by virtue of which society is the daughter of the ruler, especially the monarch. Just as the king as God creates his people from nothing, so also the king as father presents himself as his begetter or founder. The present analysis has a diachronic structure that begins at the mythical-religious stage of African peoples and classical China, goes through Greco-Roman Antiquity and the medieval model of the family as a pattern of society, and ends with John Filmer’s political theory of the biblical origin of the monarchy.