Duterte Harry: Fire and Fury in the Philippines
Jonathan Miller
Scribe: 2018
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Power,” the early-twentieth century Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin argued, “comes all by itself to the strong man.” Metaphysical in his political philosophy, he saw absolute power as a sine qua non for the fulfilment of a sacred mission by an extraordinary leader, who could single-handedly save his nation from the onslaught of what the Iranian post-colonial thinker Jalal Al-e-Ahmad would later call Gharbzadegi (“Westoxification”).

Sceptical of democratic institutions, with their obsessive commitment to due process, consultation and compromise, he instead believed in “redemptive excess” and “patriotic arbitrariness” as essential elements of leadership. For Ilyin, arbitrary rule is the true expression of power, a just instrument for the fulfilment of the redemptive mission of an enlightened dictator.

Ilyin was of course only one among a great number of thinkers who grappled with the dilemma of disruptive modernisation in late-developing nations. His views, however, are relevant to twenty-first-century strongman populism for at least two reasons.

First, Russian intellectuals, from Alexander Herzen to Mikhail Bakunin and Count Tolstoy, were arguably the first non-Western thinkers who seriously explored the prospect of “alternative modernity”: how can the East survive and compete in a Western-dominated world without losing its core values, autonomy and authenticity?

• Tags: Issue 13, Jonathan Miller, Philippines, Richard Heydarian, Rodrigo Duterte