"...we cannot imagine anything connected in an object that we have not previously connected ourselves..."
I. Kant [KRV, In 130]
"Even the ordinary, ordinary historian, who perhaps thinks and asserts that he passively perceives and trusts only the given, is not passive in his thinking, but introduces his own categories and examines the given through them."
G. V. F. Gegel [2000, p. 65]
This article continues the discussion of the state in the history of the traditional East. Some of its empirical and theoretical aspects were covered in a recent publication on Southeast Asia in the fifth and seventh centuries. [Zakharov, 2005, pp. 7-24]. The current research is inspired by the statements of two of the greatest minds of Modern times, cited above as an epigraph. The phenomenon of the state has been studied by representatives of the humanities for more than two millennia, starting with Plato and Aristotle. But there are still more questions than answers, and the arguments are now subsiding, then breaking out with renewed vigor. In this article, I would like to focus on the problems of individual concepts of the state in the traditional East, proposed in the domestic historiographic tradition in recent times, and analyze the methodological consequences that follow from this consideration.
First of all, a number of terminological clarifications are necessary. The traditional East is a conventional designation for societies that existed in Asia and North Africa at the end of the IV millennium BC - XVIII / beginning of the XIX century AD, which were "civilizations" according to the schemes of Philo-Philo. Engels and G. Child. During the analysis, the existing theories will be tested both from the point of view of their internal consistency and from the point of view of their compliance with the existing empirical data. Since historians sometimes believe that their discipline does not need theories, it is necessary to refer in advance to D. Fischer's statement, which quite cle ...
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