Global Societies and Their Time Scales

Abstract

The global societies comprise specific total social phenomena. They are at one and the same time the largest, the most imposing, the richest in content and the most influential in a given social reality. They go beyond not only the functional groupings and the social classes but even their various conflicting hierarchies, in plenitude and authority. These “macrocosms of social macrocosms” possess a juridical sovereignty which delimits the powers of all groupings including the State competing with them. The juridical sovereignty of the State has never ceased to be relative and subordinate to the global society despite all appearance of the contrary. The global societies also possess a certain social sovereignty over all the social collectivities which are part of them; as a matter of fact they play the leading role. A global society is not only structurable, but always actually structured and usually organizations enter into its structure. But the structures, whether global or partial, and the multiple organizations, never express the total social global phenomenon, not only, because it is supra-functional par excellence, but even more because it is the most mobile and the richest of all microsocial and macrosocial substructures.