Personal imperialism

Personal imperialism is a sketch for integrating a fragmented self under a single order. It was set out in the essay “Manifesto of Imperial Selfhood” (revised edition, August 2026; 10.5281/zenodo.22057583). It is an exploratory essay and has not been peer-reviewed. It is offered as a starting point for questions, not as a completed position.

“Empire” here is neither a state nor dominion over others. The abstract says so at once.

The term does not denote empire as a form of state, still less any claim to dominion over other persons; it names a strictly reflexive project.

The structure has three layers. The legislative layer is borrowed from Kant’s Kingdom of Ends: giving oneself a law and being bound by it, turned inward onto one person. The evaluative layer is borrowed from Nietzsche: the content of that law is made and remade. The mobilizational layer is borrowed from Jünger’s Gestalt of the Worker: one’s capacities are mobilized as a whole into actual form. Kant supplies form, Nietzsche content, Jünger actuality. Each is borrowed with substantial modification.

The three do not agree. That tension is the structure. Legislation alone ossifies into rule-following. Revaluation alone dissolves, and growth can no longer be told from caprice. Mobilization alone becomes activity with no direction. Each layer checks the pathology native to the other two; the essay calls this a mixed constitution. It says itself that it has not shown the three can be held together in one life.

The essay sets three qualifications for itself. The Will to Power is not a book Nietzsche wrote; it was assembled from his notebooks after his collapse by his sister and others. Jünger’s Der Arbeiter (1932) was written on the eve of the Nazi seizure of power and belongs to reactionary modernism. The essay notes that Jünger never joined the NSDAP and that the book is said to resist biological race theory, and then writes That distinction is real, but it is not a discharge.

Whether the metaphor of empire leaks outward is left unresolved. Whether a vocabulary of conquest and dominion spreads into treating other people as material to be incorporated or mobilized is kept as the single most important open problem. The answer on the relation to Nazism is objection 6 in the objections set out in advance (in Japanese).

The record admits three things. The manuscript was written in Japanese, and the published English is a translation by a language model (E5). The author has not read the cited sources (E6). The disclosure’s statement that nothing was fabricated cannot be checked by the author (E7). All three are in the errata. The paper is frozen; corrections go into the errata.

This is not a theory. The essay calls itself a provocation and a starting point for further work, not a completed doctrine. Claiming a contribution and having the field count it are different things.

The revision of the essay was prepared with Claude (Anthropic), and this page was written with Claude Code. The author is responsible for the claims. Claude is not an author.