Mabini, Hamilton, conservatism, and nation building MABINI, CONSERVATIVE ‘NATURAL’ LAWYER
This Monday is Apolinario Mabini’s 154th birthday. This year also marks the country’s 120th as a Republic. Not a bad time to revisit the life of a man many kids today seem baffled as to why he’s always sitting down.
But seriously, Mabini deserves more from us: the country’s first prime minister, also foreign affairs minister, and Supreme Court chief justice. He wrote his own constitutional drafts for our fledgling nation and left a coherent body of political thought that students and policy makers would do well learning.
Unfortunately, certain misconceptions surround Mabini, who has been appropriated by 1970s leftists and today’s progressives and transmogrified into some sort of social justice warrior. Nothing could be further from the truth. If at all, Mabini was the proto-conservative: welcoming change but deferring to the tried and tested, advocate of State sovereignty, strong government for national security purposes, citizen self-responsibility, and individual freedoms based on natural law and natural rights.
Indeed, Mabini shares fundamental things with another
thinker who founded a nation, Alexander Hamilton: “Hamilton’s conservatism is evident, in the first place, in the way he argued for institutions like the national bank and bounties for America’s infant manufacturing sector”.
Thus, “unlike a contemporary progressive, he did not favor these things because they were new or innovative. On the contrary, he advocated them precisely on the conservative ground that they had been tried, and their usefulness
proven, in other countries.” ( https://
carson-holloway/ Carson Holloway, “The Myth of Hamiltonian Big Government,” April 2015).
Mabini’s education was admirable, thankfully starting at Letran then finishing at the University of Santo Thomas, combining a deep learning in logic and philosophy with law. It is likely there that he got his Scholastic bent.
For Apolinario Mabini was clearly a “natural lawyer”; that is, a lawyer adhering to natural law (albeit in his case mixed with Enlightenment thought).
For Mabini: “Natural law was regarded as the ‘sole foundation and sufficient reason for the justice of all human laws.’ This means that to consider an act as just (and not as merely legal) implies that there is a standard for justice. This standard was both ‘ immutable and universal.’ xxx To Mabini, natural law was a law imposed upon man by virtue of his rationality.” A “positive law was not truly law insofar as it violated natural law”. ( Cesar Adib Majul, Mabini and the Philippine Revolution; citing El Mensaje del Presidente McKinley).
Here, again, is a similarity with Hamiltonian thought: for the latter, the “sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.”
MABINI AS NON-INTERNATIONALIST
Interestingly, Mabini’s natural law compass guides his belief regarding foreign relations: “Positive international law had been used, Mabini continued, as a means by which the more powerful nations could usurp the rights of smaller nations; it has been used to ‘legitimize’ the actions of the more powerful nations.” (Majul, citing Prudencia Mal Entendida).
And in the True Decalogue, Mabini writes: “While the borders of the nations established and preserved by the egoism of race and of family remain standing, you must remain united to your country in perfect solidarity of views and interests in order to gain strength, not only to combat the common enemy, but also to achieve all the objectives of human life.”
This clear eyed, un-naive view of foreign affairs is again reflected in Hamilton: “For him, the first duty of a government is to safeguard the national interest, understood not only as the nation’s independence, power, and prosperity, but also as its reputation or honor.” (Carson Holloway, “Alexander Hamilton and American Foreign Policy,” September 2015)
MABINI AND THE VIRTUOUS SELF-RELIANT FILIPINO
Mabini believed in a virtuous people running government. This again squares with Hamilton’s, who wrote in the Federalist Papers that: “http://www.azquotes. com/quote/571882 The institution of delegated power implies that there is a portion of virtue and honor among mankind which may be a reasonable foundation of confidence.”
From his writings, Majul concludes that for Mabini, “the authority in society is the people” (citing La Trinidad Politica). This echoes John Adam’s dictum about the US constitutional system, of which our political system is in direct lineage: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Majul points out: “Mabini, like Rizal, assumed that a man could not truly be said to be free unless he was first of all moral.” And that morality “consists in having the actions of men conform to natural law.”
Accordingly, a welfare State, a where citizens are dependent on