Abstract

The article starts with an overview of four core mechanisms in the formation of world society: Communication, migration, observation, and knowledge. The first three can be seen as dynamic factors bringing about and transferring variants in world society; knowledge is a kind of storage for temporary results of these dynamic operations. In the second part, the argument looks at semantics, concepts and theories, and their accumulation over 2000 years which prepare the idea and structural realization of world society as the most extensive social system which includes all sociality into its purview. In the third part, we introduce the “Eigenstructures of world society,” self-reinforcing structures which prepare world society as they are the result of the emergence of this system. The argument presents six candidates for Eigenstructures: Functional differentiation, small world networks, formal organizations, epistemic communities, global interaction systems, and world events. They all demonstrate the unity of structure formation and self-description characteristic of world society.