Moral Forces, Philosophy of History, and War in José Rizal

This article attempts to reconstruct an aspect of José Rizal’s interpretation of history from some fragmentary remarks in the important essay “The Philippines a Century Hence” (1889–1890). It argues that previous efforts to arrive at such an understanding have been hampered by a lack of attention to the categories that Rizal himself used in that work. Employing the method of conceptual concordance, the study proposes that a possible source for Rizal’s historical categories may ultimately be traced to the tradition of German historicism and, in particular, to the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz.