SUMMARY:

This is a Russian translation of the chapter “Inventing Traditional Society: Empire and the Origins of Social Theory,” from the book by Karuna Mantena Alibis of Empire. Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton University Press, 2010). The author offers a detailed analysis of the emergence of social theory in the nineteenth century in the course of parallel transformations of imperial ideology (from moral justifications to retroactive alibis) and the scientific views of society and social. Mantena traces the intellectual roots of late imperial ideology in the emergence of an ideal-typical model of traditional society – a central innovation of nineteenth-century social theory. In the chapter, the reciprocal relationship between empire and social theory are framed with a special focus on works of social thinkers and scholars such as Henry Maine, Benjamin Constant, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Émile Durkheim, and others.