Ugrin, I. M. The Category of the ‘Imperial’: Philosophical Analysis

Abstract: The article is devoted to the problem of the imperial as a category of political philosophy. In the first part of the article the author analyzes common myths related to the term ‘empire’ and proves these myths to be indefensible and very different from actual historical events. The second part of the article views the category ‘imperial’ in terms of its relation to the ideologies that were popular in the 20th century, i.e. nationalism, socialism and liberalism. The author describes the connection between the imperial idea and liberal, nationalistic and socialistic ideas. The author also shows the close connection between the two categories, the ‘imperial’ and ‘civilizations’. The author gives a definition of the positive idea of the empire. The main research methods used by the author include methods obtained from comparative political studies, abstraction (which allows to withdraw from details that do not interest us), analysis and synthesis (which provide the integral concept of the ‘imperial’). There are a lot of conjectures and prejudices around the definition of ‘empire’ and these conjectures and prejudices do not allow us to see the essential features behind the process of establishment of a state which was later called ‘empire’ by historians. According to the author, the category ‘imperial’ is inseparable from the categories ‘universal’ and ‘order’. If we are to give a very short definition of the empire, we can call it a ‘universal order’. In the modern world captured by the wave of globalization, the question about the universal order grows especially important and so does the question about the empire.

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