Abstract

When it comes to the philosophical reception of the imperial idea and practice between the two world wars, we recognize Ortega y Gasset, Evola and Heidegger as the most typical figures. True, they paid her different attention, the conceptual vehicles they used were only partially comparable, and the normative conclusions they reached were quite different. Heidegger does not criticize the imperial idea based, for example, on the humanistic perspective, but on the basis of his ontological concept according to which every socially accepted practice to cope with reality relies on a certain assumption of Being. Still, this “background ontology” of the imperial world relation does not exclude his analysis of its pragmatic aspects. Heidegger, however, completely and consciously ignores the cosmological-symbolic dimension of the concept of empire. Ortega connects the real historical context with the metaphysicalreligious component of the imperial, to the extent that it is the principle of both internal arrangement and external behaviour of very different social organisms - from household to state. And Evola emphasizes the ideological and symbolic side of the imperial idea, which, in his view, should not remain only a matter of the past, but should be re-embodied in the future.