Description
On the eve of the bicentenary of the formal founding of International Relations (IR), this chapter looks back at the origins and evolution of Global Society Theory (GST). It starts with a review of the deep origins of thinking about global society, with the so-called ‘English School’, and its thinking about international and world society, as it evolved during the last decades of Western-global international society from the 1950s to 2019. Section 2 covers the turbulent period of deep and contested pluralism dominating the 2020s and 30s, and marking both the transition from a Western-dominated to a more global international society, and from the English School framing to an emergent GST one. Section 3 surveys the development of GST, and its relationship to the embedded pluralism and humanist solidarism that consolidated global society in the long five decades following the Impactor Crisis of the late 2030s. Section 4 examines the breakdown and reconfiguration of GST from the 2090s to the present under the rising pressure of deep divisions over questions about the nature and purpose of humankind.
