Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality by Lisandro E. Claudio

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality by Lisandro E. Claudio Megan Thomas LISANDRO E. CLAUDIO Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 89 pages. In this welcome addition to scholarship interpreting José Rizal's writings, Lisandro E. Claudio offers an important examination of Rizal's reflections on liberal principles, centering especially on Rizal's attention to individual rights and his admiration for them as keystones of the progress that he sought in the Philippines and for its people as part of a modern world. Claudio is a prolific public intellectual and scholar, known for his Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013), the award-winning Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017), and innumerable essays and shorter pieces. Claudio often defends liberal principles and ideas against attacks that he sees as unfair, misinformed, and politically bankrupt; Jose Rizal belongs to the strand of Claudio's work that recuperates liberalism in, for, and beyond the Philippines. As part of the "Global Political Thinkers" series of Palgrave's Pivot project with an international English-reading academic audience, the book aims to introduce Rizal's thought in a concise way to those not yet familiar with Rizal or Philippine politics and history. It does so by advancing an argument that contributes to the historiography of Rizal and resonates in the political present: Claudio argues that Rizal is a fundamentally liberal thinker, that he viewed politics through the "overarching lens" of liberalism (xi) and was "one of colonial/postcolonial liberalism's earliest and most prescient thinkers" (ix). Claudio eschews a narrow definition of liberalism, but it becomes clear that for him, as for his understanding of Rizal, liberalism is primarily understood as the promotion and protection of individual rights and civil liberties. For Claudio, Rizal understood that even liberal colonizers failed to ensure liberal rights in the colony and also thought that liberalism could be "purified" in the colony by the suffering colonial subject (27). At the core of the short book are three chapters on Rizal's writings. These chapters focus on liberal principles or liberalism in evidence, respectively, in Rizal's letters and essays (chapter 2), Noli me tangere (chapter 3), and El filibusterismo (chapter 4). Each of these chapters stands alone, but they cohere in an overall argument that Rizal's political thought centrally [End Page 509] treated the problem of liberalism's failures in a colonial setting as well as its fundamental and undeniable promise. Claudio reads the Noli and the Fili as "twin experiments in two kinds of change, both associated with variants of liberalism," the Noli as an experiment testing "the viability of liberal reformism" in the Philippines and the Fili as "an experiment in Jacobin revolution" (43). Claudio sets the stage for his chapters on the novels by preceding them with a selected reading of Rizal's letters and essays (chapter 2), some of which are better known than others, but which are here mined specifically for reflections on liberal principles. In one particularly helpful passage for the author's purposes, we read Rizal writing in 1889 about the injustices of Spanish governance in the Philippines: "the more vexations are committed the more Filipino liberals will emerge" (28). In Claudio's reading, Rizal held that such "vexations" would "engender a culture of liberalism and embolden liberals to take stances and make sacrifices" (29). For Claudio, Rizal saw liberalism as consisting of appropriately universal political principles of civil liberties—such as the freedom of speech (and the press), freedom of religion, and protection of private property—universal principles in the sense that they ought to be respected by governments everywhere. In turn, Claudio's Rizal saw the import and value of these liberal principles in high relief because they were fundamentally contradicted in the abuses committed by the government and friars in the Philippines. The book argues that for Rizal liberalism's value was especially potent in the context of those abuses: "No European could understand the travails of a liberal in the colony, because for Rizal, Europeans did...