New Society

Also known as: Bagong Lipunan

Definition

The New Society (Filipino: Bagong Lipunan) was the program and governing idea with which President Ferdinand Marcos described and justified the order he built after the proclamation of martial law in September 1972 — the claim, in the formula his own writings and his party’s founding documents fixed, that “constitutional authoritarianism” was necessary to “reform society” and create a “new society” based on new social and political values. The term was the regime’s own: Marcos called martial law the prelude to the bagong lipunan, elaborated the doctrine in his 1973 book Notes on the New Society — which urged the poor and the privileged to work as one — and named his political party, the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan (“New Society Movement,” founded February 4, 1978), after it. (Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — Kilusang Bagong Lipunan)

As a program, the New Society bundled constitutional restructuring (the 1973 Constitution and its parliamentary apparatus), rice self-sufficiency through Masagana 99, a national building program of cultural centers, convention halls, bridges, highways, rail, and specialty hospitals, and a rhetoric of discipline and reform-from-above. Its record is the most contested terrain in Philippine historiography: headline growth in the 1970s, a debt-driven collapse in 1983–1985, and a documented toll of extrajudicial killings, torture, and incarceration, ending with the regime’s fall at the EDSA People Power Revolution of February 1986. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)

Identities

Source	Identifier	URL
Wikipedia	Bagong Lipunan (redirects to Ferdinand Marcos, section “Bagong Lipunan (New Society)”)	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagong_Lipunan
Wikidata	N/A	N/A
DBpedia	Bagong_Lipunan (redirects to Ferdinand_Marcos)	https://dbpedia.org/page/Bagong_Lipunan
ProductOntology	N/A	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)	N/A	N/A
MeSH	N/A	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A	N/A
AGROVOC	N/A	N/A
Google Scholar	New Society Bagong Lipunan Marcos martial law 1972 constitutional authoritarianism Notes on the New Society	https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22New+Society%22+Marcos+%22Bagong+Lipunan%22
ConceptNet	N/A	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A	N/A

Also Known As

Bagong Lipunan

Examples and Analogies

A revolution that came by proclamation: the New Society claimed the language of revolution while proceeding by decree — as if a government had announced that reform would arrive not by mobilizing citizens from below but by suspending the institutions that might obstruct it; Marcos’s Notes on the New Society cast even the poor-and-privileged partnership as a project the state would administer. (Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)
The edifice complex: the program’s most visible logic was construction — the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex, the Philippine International Convention Center, the San Juanico Bridge, the Pan-Philippine Highway, the Manila LRT, and the specialty centers for heart, lung, and kidney care — critics’ label for the building spree, “edifice complex,” captured a state that built monuments to its own renewal. (Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)
Growth with a fuse: the 1970s economy ran on borrowed acceleration — GDP quadrupling between 1972 and 1980 on external debt that grew more than tenfold by 1985 — the analogy of a household remodeling on credit: the rooms are real, the foreclosure schedule is also real. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)
Verified program data:
Term: bagong lipunan, the regime’s Filipino name for its post-1972 order
Doctrine: “constitutional authoritarianism” to “reform society” and create a “new society” — the KBL’s founding rationalization
Book: Notes on the New Society (1973), Marcos’s own account
Party: Kilusang Bagong Lipunan, founded February 4, 1978 — the New Society’s electoral vehicle
Constitutional frame: the 1973 Constitution, ratified through a plebiscite administered and overseen by the military
Formal lifting of martial law: Proclamation No. 2045, January 17, 1981, proclaiming the objectives achieved

Usage Scenarios

1. Studying Authoritarian Developmentalism

Political scientists use the New Society as a Southeast Asian case of authoritarian modernization — comparing its 1970s growth years and subsequent debt crisis to the region’s other strong-state projects, with the Philippine variant’s distinguishing feature that its borrowing ended in a lost development decade. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)

2. Reading Regime Self-Justification

Researchers analyzing official rhetoric pair Proclamation No. 1081’s actual text — which rests on armed rebellion and secession, not on “new society” language — with the later doctrine in Notes on the New Society and Proclamation No. 2045’s 1981 catalog of claimed achievements, to show how justification evolved from emergency to program. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 1081, LawPhil — Proclamation No. 2045)

3. Assessing the Agricultural Program

The rice self-sufficiency drive — Masagana 99, launched May 21, 1973, and documented in this wiki’s entry on the program — is the New Society’s most studied domestic initiative, cited both as the achievement Proclamation No. 2045 claimed (“rice self-sufficiency”) and as a credit program whose repayment collapsed on its farmers. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 2045, Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)

4. Tracking the Party as the Program’s Extension

The Kilusang Bagong Lipunan institutionalized the concept electorally — sweeping the Interim Batasang Pambansa in 1978 and carrying Marcos to re-election in 1981 — the record this wiki’s KBL entry documents as the New Society’s parliamentary face. (Wikipedia — Kilusang Bagong Lipunan)

5. Teaching the 1986 Transition

The concept’s end is the standard classroom arc: the 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr., the 1983–1985 economic collapse, the February 1986 snap election, and the EDSA People Power Revolution that ended both the regime and its “society” on February 25, 1986, with Marcos flown to Hawaiian exile. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)

Strategies

Emergency into doctrine: the regime converted a proclamation justified by rebellion into a governing philosophy — martial law (1972) became Notes on the New Society (1973), became a constitution (1973), became a party (1978) — each step normalizing the last. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 1081, Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)
Monumentalism as evidence of reform: infrastructure and institutions — convention centers, highways, hospitals, the Batasang Pambansa — served as the visible proof of renewal, the strategy critics named the edifice complex. (Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)
Claimed gains enumerated at the exit: Proclamation No. 2045 dated the lifting of martial law with an inventory — land reform that the proclamation said freed 523,153 farmers from tenancy, six-to-seven percent growth, rice self-sufficiency, the Tripoli Agreement — the regime’s own balance sheet, and therefore a primary source to be read against independent records. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 2045)
Youth and curriculum as transmission: the Bagong Lipunan reoriented civics and history teaching toward constitutional authoritarianism and organized youth volunteerism under Presidential Decree No. 684 (April 1975) — the educational strategy for reproducing the concept in the next generation. (Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)

Security and Safety Measures

The security state the concept required: the documented apparatus of the era — 3,257 known extrajudicial killings, 35,000 documented tortures, 737 enforced disappearances, and some 70,000 incarcerations, per the documentation of Amnesty International and Philippine human-rights groups — is the security record against which the “reform” language must be read. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)
Press and information control: media closure and the selective reopening of outlets under regime cronies, documented in the martial-law record, made the New Society’s information environment a core part of its maintenance. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)
For researchers: attribute the program’s claims to their carriers — the proclamations, the books, the party documents — and test them against the independent documentation; the corpus entries on martial law and Proclamation No. 1081 apply this discipline. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 1081, Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)

Historical Context

The phrase entered Philippine political language in the months after September 21, 1972, when Proclamation No. 1081 placed the entire country under martial law on the strength of an alleged communist conspiracy and the Mindanao secessionist movement — a text that, notably, contains no “new society” language at all. The concept followed: Marcos framed martial law as the prelude to creating a bagong lipunan “based on new social and political values,” wrote the doctrine into Notes on the New Society in 1973, and secured the 1973 Constitution through a military-overseen ratification. The programs accumulated through the 1970s — Masagana 99’s rice drive from 1973, the construction of the cultural center complex, convention center, San Juanico Bridge, the Pan-Philippine Highway, the LRT, and the heart, lung, and kidney centers — while the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan, founded February 4, 1978, gave the concept a party. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 1081, Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — Kilusang Bagong Lipunan)

The balance sheet turned in the 1980s. Growth that peaked near nine percent in 1973 and 1976 had quadrupled GDP from eight billion dollars in 1972 to 32.45 billion in 1980; external debt rose from 2.3 billion dollars in 1970 to 26.2 billion in 1985; the 1983 assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. detonated the political crisis, the economy contracted through 1983–1985, and per-capita output did not recover its earlier levels until 2003. On January 17, 1981, Proclamation No. 2045 lifted martial law while cataloguing the regime’s claimed gains; the June 1981 re-election and the 1984 Batasan contest could not arrest the collapse, and the February 1986 snap election and EDSA uprising ended the New Society with Marcos’s flight to Hawaii on February 25, 1986. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos, LawPhil — Proclamation No. 2045)

Challenges and Controversies

Growth Versus Debt

The documented economic record cuts both ways: near-nine-percent growth peaks in 1973 and 1976 and a quadrupling of GDP to 1980, against external debt rising from 2.3 billion dollars (1970) to 26.2 billion (1985) — a debt series the standard account itself flags as needing citation — and a contraction so severe that per-capita GDP regained its level only in 2003, the “two lost decades” judgment of the economic literature. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)

The Human-Rights Record

Against the reform rhetoric stands the enumerated toll — 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 tortured, 737 disappeared, 70,000 imprisoned, per Amnesty International and Task Force Detainees documentation — together with the kleptocracy characterization (“corruption, extravagance, and brutality”) that the standard account applies to the whole tenure. (Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos)

Revisionist Debates

Since the regime’s fall, loyalist and revisionist accounts have promoted the martial-law years as a golden age — a framing Marcos’s own children have sustained by denying the documented violations — while the historical and economic literature maintains the record of debt, suppression, and the lost development decades; Wikipedia carries the dispute under “historical distortion,” and Philippine fact-checking has made the New Society’s record a standing battlefield. (Wikipedia — Ferdinand Marcos, Wikipedia — Martial law under Ferdinand Marcos)

What the Proclamation Actually Said

A subtle but persistent controversy: the New Society is often traced directly to Proclamation No. 1081, yet the proclamation’s text justifies martial law by armed rebellion and secession alone — the “new society” doctrine is a post-proclamation construction of Marcos’s speeches and 1973 book, a distinction researchers should preserve. (LawPhil — Proclamation No. 1081)