Anarchy of families

Alfred McCoy’s name for the Philippine arrangement, from the edited volume of the same title. Leaders fuse family, politics and business into a single operation, compromising public institutions to build private wealth. The loop he describes is the important part: elite power both derives from a weak state and keeps producing one, because a strong state would be the only thing capable of ending it.

The 2009 preface updates the old shorthand for how Philippine elections are won, “guns, goons and gold,” to four Cs: continuity, Chinese, criminality and celebrity.

Source: Alfred W. McCoy (ed.), An Anarchy of Families: State and Family in the Philippines, University of Wisconsin Press, 1994, revised edition 2009. Paid, and named on the page as a moat this course has not crossed. McCoy is also the compiler most associated with the human rights totals for the martial law years, in “Dark Legacy: Human Rights under the Marcos Regime,” 1999, and the same volume supplies the observation carried in Lesson 1.4 that the Americans built electoral politics from the municipality upwards.

First used in: 1.8 · Four days, and then the same families came back