Abstract
The paper gives an overview of the most important insights one needs to construct a theory of world society. The paper 1 defines the concept of society and tries to find out how many different types of society are to be observed in the history of human social systems, 2 connects the argument about the sequence of types of society with a reconstruction of the patterns of the settlement of the earth by groups of humans and 3 resumes these arguments by presenting a general concept of sociocultural evolution as the basic process of the formation of societies. The paper then switches its focus to a reconstruction of modern world society as the contemporary form of society (18th-21st Centuries) and 4 defines the main aspects of the complexity of the world system and the nexus to functional differentiation, 5 identifies the inclusion revolutions since the 18th century as the starting point of global function systems such as the economy, education, science and polity, and 6 explains the interrelation of function systems and the other emerging Eigenstructures of world society (global networks, global organizations, epistemic communities, global interaction systems) and finally 7 works out the basic mechanisms of globalization - namely communication, migration, observation and knowledge.
Keywords:
World system; Sociocultural evolution; Global complexity; Functional differentiation; Globalization mechanisms