Political eschatology as a category of political science: from a theological concept to an operational politological construct

Abstract

The article substantiates and operationalises the concept of "political eschatology" as an The article is devoted to the theoretical and methodological substantiation and operationalization of the concept of “political eschatology” as an independent category of political science capable of explaining a specific type of political rationality, strategic goal-setting, and resource mobilization. The author proposes a functional definition of political eschatology as a system of ideas about the teleological direction and ultimate goal of the political process that directly determines the strategic goal-setting of a political actor, structures its perception of historical time, and conditions its willingness to incur extraordinary costs, regardless of the religious character of the language employed. On this basis, a minimum set of five structural criteria is established for qualifying a political narrative as eschatological: the presence of a mission-bearing subject, an ontologized enemy, a transformative event, an image of the ultimate political order, and a specific eschatological chronotope. These criteria enable the empirical identification of eschatological constructs and their differentiation from other forms of political mythology and teleological thinking. A systematic conceptual demarcation of political eschatology from six adjacent categories is undertaken: religious eschatology, political theology, messianism, apocalypticism, political ideology, and religious extremism. The arguments of the classical and contemporary theoretical traditions represented by the works of Carl Schmitt, Karl Löwith, Eric Voegelin, Hans Blumenberg, and Alister E. McGrath are critically reconsidered. A fundamental methodological gap is identified: despite the substantial conceptual contributions of these approaches, they do not provide an operationalization of the eschatological dimension in the form of reproducible empirical indicators and an applied analytical toolkit. To address this gap, the article proposes an original operational framework comprising the IHEP/GEPI sub-index system, interpretive bands of the normalized index, a “compass” model of political eschatology, and a sequential procedure for coding source corpora. The applicability of the proposed toolkit to the comparative analysis of political actors, narratives, and regimes, as well as to the identification of the degree of eschatologization of political discourse, is substantiated. The security relevance of the concept is demonstrated: eschatological rationality functionally alters the structure of the political utility function by redefining the relationship between costs, risks, and expected outcomes. This produces a specific model of strategic behavior in which material losses may be interpreted as an acceptable or necessary price for achieving a teleologically defined objective, thereby generating a systematic predictive deficit in classical deterrence models and increasing the risk of escalation. The proposed conceptual framework provides a basis for further empirical research on political eschatology, forecasting the behavior of actors characterized by a high degree of eschatologization, and developing early-warning tools for identifying corresponding risks in the fields of national and international security.