Apolinario Mabini’s Anticolonial Thought and the Emergence of the Philippine Radical Tradition

Apolinario Mabini (1864-1903) was a Tagalog intellectual and statesman who is widely considered to be the ‘brains’ of the Philippine Revolution that brought out Asia’s first republic. In this paper, I discuss Mabini’s implicit anticolonial social and political theory as elaborated in his writings on the Philippine Revolution and its ramifications. I argue that his aphorisms and theorizations on imperialist ideology, the colonial condition, and notions of postcolonial nationhood constitute the early elements of what can be called the Philippine Radical Tradition. The materialization of such a radical intellectual tradition as part of the broader corpus of anticolonial thought calls for us to critically reimagine and apply alternative groundworks for sociological theorizing and practice in our postcolonial conjuncture. This paper contributes to a growing strand of historical-sociological scholarship that reclaims the intellectual legacies of oft-neglected thinkers in the social and political sciences, thus opening a terrain for challenging and rearticulating disciplinary frameworks that speak more inwardly to both the ideological consequences and material realities of the recurring imperial modes of modern knowledge production.