Between Empire and National State — the Modern Context of K. Leontiev’s Concept

Abstract

In the 1980s, Historical Sociology and Philosophy turned to the subject of Empire, based on new premises. The Empire is no longer understood by many researchers as a vestige of the political reality of the past. They began to interpret it as a mechanism for transforming chaos into order, connecting the civilizational periphery to the ‘future’, which is controlled by the center of civilization. The metaphor of the ‘eternal return’ became a popular way of describing the phenomenon of Empire. At the same time, this interpretation of Empire somewhat simplifies this phenomenon, adjusting it to the realities of the modern world with its globalist tendencies and centers of power (the U.S.A., the European Union), which provide these tendencies. At the same time, the idea of the nation-state has become an instrument for destruction of empires of a different, non-modern type, in order to integrate them into the order of the global future. Long before the realities of the European Union, K. Leontiev predicted that nationalism would become a prologue to the homogenization of human beings and their culture. Contrary to the ‘arithmetic equality’ of Western civilization, states of the ‘old’, pre-colonial imperial type, one of which Russia used to be and remains, in a sense, can offer a much more diverse landscape with a significant number of, in modern terms, ‘ecological niches’ for securing cultural identity. In Russian philosophy, the concept of an imperial-type state was the subject of very fruitful research, and this happened much earlier than the contemporary ‘imperial turn’ in Political Philosophy and Historical Sociology. The ideas of K. Leontiev convincingly demonstrate this. We believe that the most instructive are K. Leontiev’s ideas about the national state, as well as predictions of its future.