Theory Workshop03 From Societas to World Society

From Societas to World Society offers a genealogy of sociology’s key concept, “society.” Recovering its millennia-long intellectual history, Schmidt suggests a conceptualization that sheds the social sciences’ Eurocentric legacies and lays foundations for a global social science. From Societas to World Society offers a genealogy of what is arguably sociology’s most important concept, that of “society.” The book covers this concept’s entire intellectual history from its first systematization in Roman law 2,500 years ago to its crystallization in what Schmidt calls today's default model, informing both empirical research and theoretical logic in the social sciences, which he shows to be highly problematic. As an alternative, Schmidt suggests a conceptualization building upon Niklas Luhmann’s theory of world society, which can be utilized for overcoming the former’s Eurocentrism and to lay the groundwork for a genuinely global social science.