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В поисках империи: подходы к определению понятия в современном научном дискурсе
The concept of empire seems quite transparent: from our school days, we learn to perceive the historical past through the chronological succession and life cycles of empires. In everyday interpretations, empire is something vast, powerful and wealthy in every sense of the word, which explains numerous metaphorical references to “empire”
in marketing; dictionary definitions also lack precision. Given the growing popularity of extremely broad historical-political concepts (like interdisciplinary interest in “civilization”, it is necessary to clarify the main interpretations
of “empire”, especially since it is not an alien concept to sociology. While admitting the well-known challenges of defining empire, the author tries to structure this amorphous conceptual field by suggesting several possible ways: first, identifying “typological syndromes” in search results for “definition of empire” — four broad and
overlapping interpretations (historical-philological, historical-(geo)political, critical-cultural, and philosophical-katechontic). Second, conducting quantitative content analysis of dictionary definitions of “empire” based on the search results from the Academic dictionary portal — five most frequent interpretations (figurative meaning; part of the names of historical states; substantive definitions with attributes of empire as a specific form of state organization; monarchical or imperial rule; and a common noun). Third, a study of expert discourse — qualitative content analysis of articles in the Ab Imperio, which specializes in the development of methodologies for studying empires, — conceptual foundations and key categories of contemporary “empire studies” (e.g., new imperial history, imperial
experience, imperial rhetoric, imperial chronotope, imperial biography, imperial situation, post-empire). Thus, there is a conflict between two conditional approaches — universalist-objectifying and discursive-contextual, but the general research focus has shifted from attempts to construct grand theories or typologies to the analysis of imperial experience within a critical examination of any social order and its self-representations