The phenomenon of imposture. Transcendental legitimacy of power in political modernity

Abstract

The article deals with the theoretical problem of studying imposture as a phenomenon of history, which is often seen only as an event frame relating to a certain time. But imposture is recurrent, becomes chronic, and therefore needs to be conceptualized not only as an event phenomenon, but also as a peculiar constant of Russian reality, in which together with the “present” coexist the so-called “sediments”, testifying to the deeper nature of the “past in the present”. The author comes to the idea that a peculiar constant of Russian history was the informalized power, initially asserting its transcendent rather than legal (civil) function. It was determined by both religious postulates and the political specifics of the region itself. The phenomenon of imposture can be extended to the limits of the history of the autocracy itself. In any case, the proposed model of including imposture in the history of the autocracy poses a new question to the researcher – about the nature of legitimacy in the informal legal tradition of Russia throughout the centuries.