In the introduction, I discussed the Luhmannian idea that society consists of communications as its basic elements. They form a system by referring to each other, by constituting themselves with reference to other communi- cations. My writing here is an example: it refers in complex ways to other communication, both past (e.g. my own writing, that of others in English and other languages, and so forth) and future. It has its meaning only through such reference. Moreover, following a Luhmannian model, it is not complete unless it is understood (whether correctly or not). People are necessary for this, but as text, it also has a life of its own: it is communica- tion not consciousness.
From this rudimentary starting point, two implications are critical for my main themes of globalization and religion. These concern the range of communications and the division of communications, the extent of the system that is society and the subunits of that society. One leads to the observation of a global society; the other to subsystems of that society, including function systems.
If society consists of communications, then the extent of a society corre- sponds to how far those communications are accessible, to the range of places and people where and with whom information imparted can be and is understood. If, for instance, this book finds its way to Montreal, Melbourne, Murmansk, Mumbai, Mombassa and Montevideo; and it is read and understood there; then that suggests that the society of which it is a component reaches to all those centres. Considering the amount of communication in today’s world that has this sort of reach, it becomes easy to understand how, from a Luhmannian perspective, most of us today live in a global society. The passage to global observation is comparatively straightforward. We do not have to think alike; we do not have to share
the same set of values and norms; we simply have to be participating in the same web of imparted and understood communication, something that includes the possibility that we might be trying to kill each other. Whatever else the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York did, it certainly made a statement! Indeed, this horrific example shows how, on this communicative model, society is not a matter of solidarity or consensus, of similarity at some basic level like worldview or sense of belonging. It is only about the interconnectedness of communication.
Aside from revealing the contemporary world system rather straightfor- wardly as a society, the focus on the social as communication also opens up and largely defuses the question of when the globalization of society began. On this view, it started already when communication of any sort extended its reach over larger and larger areas. The development of writing in different regions is of central importance in this respect. World systems of various sorts before the modern era qualify to a degree. Clearly important varieties of communication had a very broad geographical range, even though these social networks were not worldwide and the types and amount of communication were far more limited than is the case now. The early modern period was similar both in the regions it did not reach, and in the intensity of communicative connections. What separates this example from others dating back to centuries before the Common Era is only that we know with hindsight that it eventuated in the current, clearly much more intensely globalized situation; both in terms of effec- tively and constantly reaching almost all corners of the world and in the sheer amount of communication that knows no frontiers. What the Luhmannian point of departure then does is to shift the question in from ‘When did globalization begin?’ to ‘What have been the specific differences that, historically speaking, made this most recent world system different, leading for the first time to a truly global society?’ This question leads to the other critical implication of the communicative starting point, namely how society divides its communication.
Beyond quite simple social situations, the complexity of the possible sources of communication, of the meanings in which communications are embedded, and of the possibilities for what are to be the subjects of communication becomes so high that ways of simplifying communicative situations are needed. One effective way of doing this is to divide commu- nicative processes into relatively clear social subunits so that possible sources, meanings and themes are more manageable in each case. Historically, sociology has tended to conceive this type of solution according to groups or subunits of social actors; and that is indeed one very common way of accomplishing the divisions: limit the participants in communication to certain categories of people who are the carriers of more restricted meanings and orientations. Durkheim and Marx have given us classic formulations in their analyses of the division of labour in
society. Insightful and influential as these theories have been, their strength is also their main limitation. By identifying social divisions primarily as divisions of people into groups, they block the ability to see this strategy as only one possibility among several. Society is thus composed of individual persons who are further subdivided into groups like clans, families, villages, professions, classes, nations; or, in more updated fashion, genders, cultures and the like. The insufficiency of thus making social categories so heavily dependent on physical human bodies is that people in most soci- eties through their communication also cross-cut such divisions. Here we find the main impetus for the development of role theory in sociology: people play different roles, sometimes predominantly one role, and it is these roles that are subdivided to constitute important social divisions. In situations where one role seems to determine all the other ones that a person might occupy, social convention and sociological observation can treat that person as if they were that role. One is a proletarian, a woman, an adult or a Samurai. All else follows. This historically very prevalent strategy, however, should not blind us to the possibility of making social divisions on a rather different basis. Going a step further to conceive the basic social unit, not as roles, which are still too much attached to persons, but as communications allows a maximum of flexibility in this regard. Such a step further is critical in the present context. To understand the globalization of contemporary society, how it constitutes itself and why it came about when no other world system has had this result, we have to be able to see how what binds into the same society is actually quite ‘imper- sonal’, very much abstracted from individual persons and individual bodies, even though it also assumes these and avails itself of them in communication. Put somewhat differently, the globalization of society has been dependent on the development of social divisions which largely abstract from persons and from solidary groupings of persons. Those solidary groupings, in turn, far from disappearing, instead take on a different importance in the overall social structure that is contemporary global society. I treat them in more detail later in this chapter.
A Luhmannian approach to social subdivisions thus begins with communications. These, and not in a direct sense people, generate the subdivisions of a society in the form of social systems. In his own work, Luhmann clearly analyzed only three types of such social system, namely interactions, organizations and societal systems. Society as such is only the most encompassing version of the last type. In the following chapters, I add a fourth type, social movements, to the other three.3I discuss interac-
tions, organizations, and social movements below and in Chapter 2, which centres on the religious system of global society. Here it is societal systems that are primarily at issue. These are the social subdivisions, like clans and classes, that have the greatest effect on the range of societal communica- tion. Depending on which kind of societal subsystem has primacy in any
given situation, the society in question will tend to be more restrictive or more expansive in the geographical and social reach of its communication.
Although his analyses varied across his career, Luhmann isolated at most four types of societal subsystem differentiation: segmentary, core/ periphery, stratified and functional. These are not logically exhaustive but comparing them allows one to understand the difference of the modern context which exhibits a dominance of functional differentiation.
Segmentary differentiation divides the social processes of a society into subunits that are in principle interchangeable, one subsystem not depending on any of the others. So-called tribal societies are good exam- ples, divided into residential or kinship groups, each of which could continue to exist if one of the others disappeared. The subunits, whether tribes, clans, villages, bands or similar divisions, have important relations with others, perhaps in the form of exogamous kinship relations, seasonal festivals, trading relationships, occasional alliances for specific purposes, or war. The limits of such societies lie in the dominance of this form of differentiation. The level of functional specialization and of stratification is low, reflecting a relatively equal distribution of social power and therefore the comparative absence of conditions for adaptive upgrading, the increase in specialized types of communication. These are oral societies in which communication generally happens in face-to-face situations that depend on the physical presence of the people involved. Their exact boundaries may be somewhat vague since the communication can over a longer period range quite far; but most communication will be local and therefore for all intents and purposes so will the societies.
By contrast, societies that have exhibited a dominance of stratified or core/periphery differentiation structure themselves on an asymmetric prin- ciple, with communicative resources and specialized types of communication being concentrated in certain subsystems rather than others. The cores are usually cities and their surrounding areas. Here is where wealth and power are concentrated, where artistic production and specialized knowledge are centred. The peripheries are less notable in all these regards, but they are absolutely necessary for the core to be able to function; the peripheries are those locations from which resources for the core are extracted, whether in the form of food, materials or people. The communication that happens in the core is in most senses different from that which happens in the peripheries, which are themselves more segmen- tarily differentiated (cf. Gellner 1983). Indeed, people from the peripheries generally do not even have the communicative competence to participate in core life, often speaking different languages and living by different customs. Corresponding to the greater concentration of communicative resources, core subsystems usually developed writing, which was itself a functionally specialized craft. In general, the technological sophistication of these cores was much higher than either segmentary societies or their
own peripheries. Core/periphery divisions have therefore been typical of many empires of the past, for example in China, the Middle East or the Americas. Their effective range is more or less identical with the range of core communication which, however, is much greater precisely because of the specialization both in terms of type and mode of transmission. Yet because such communication has to be core communication – that is, iden- tifiable as coming from the core – its range is nonetheless limited; no empire or even world system of the past has managed either to occupy more than a quite delimited portion of the world or to maintain especially vast areas under its control for long periods of time. Above all, core communication is itself subject to segmenting: what were provincial outposts can set themselves up as alternative cores as long as they are effectively out of range of their former metropolis. Thus Alexander’s empire did not much outlast him; and the vast Muslim empire of the eighth century quickly became divided thereafter. In both cases, however, what they left behind was a kind of world system which can be considered a single society given the intensity of communication that passed from one end to the other. Core/periphery differentiation can and has produced very far-ranging and often very stable societal systems.
Societies dominated by stratified subsystem formation are in many ways quite similar to core-periphery societies, especially since the latter often included important stratification, not only between core and periphery but, more importantly, within the core. What distinguishes this type is that the subsystems exist more or less in the same place, but establish their boundaries through the artifice of the stratum. What matters is not so much where communication occurs or where it originates, but rather to whom – to which stratum – communication is attributed. Stratified systems such as have existed in South Asia, in pre-modern Europe or in Polynesia feature the concentration of communicative power and resources within the upper strata. They also typically exhibit strong prohibitions or a least limitations on communication among strata, especially since in this case difference of place or mode of communication cannot by themselves ensure the difference among the subsystems. The extent of stratified soci- eties, like the somewhat similar core/periphery ones, is contingent on the range of upper strata communication. Yet because they do not depend as much on separations of place to help define their subsystems, these soci- eties can also be quite small in terms of both population and geographical area. The highly stratified societies of pre-modern Polynesia are good examples of small-scale stratified societies; medieval Europe with its exten- sive network of noble families covering much of that subcontinent exemplifies a rather larger version. The reference to families is, moreover, quite important because it points to the fact that segmentary differentia- tion – here into different families – far from disappearing in contexts where core/periphery or stratified differentiation dominate, continues to
remain critical but is now used to help structure the dominant form, rather than being the dominant form. Typically in such societies, people ‘belong’ to a core, a periphery or a stratum by virtue of their belonging to a partic- ular segmentary unit such as a family.
This brief presentation of some of the main features of other forms of dominant societal differentiation sets the stage for considering the differ- ence that functional differentiation makes. All societies have availed themselves to some extent of the possibility of functional specialization, but almost always in the form of divisions of labour where functional specialization expresses or is otherwise a way of helping to structure other, dominant forms of differentiation. Thus divisions of labour in tribal soci- eties usually follow lines of gender, kinship or residence, thereby reinforcing the structuring of communication along kinship or residential lines. Functional specialization in core/periphery societies follows the pattern of this dominant form in that functional specialists reside in core areas and help to lend those areas their prestige. In stratified societies economic, political, intellectual and other specialized roles are assigned a particular stratum, as is evidenced in the complex South Asian caste or jati system with all its variations. Historically, however, only recently has there arisen a society in which functional specialization has become the principle for forming the dominant subsystems as opposed to simply helping to structure these. This is modern and now global society.
Medieval European society in the fourteenth century was a dominantly stratified society, divided essentially according to the distinction between noble and common. At that time, however, and gradually over the succeeding centuries, this was in the process of changing. The rise of the absolutist states, the emergence of a capitalist economy, the growth of science, the development of educational and medical institutions, the emer- gence of positive law, but also the increasing differentiation of religion in the form of the churches are the main hallmarks of a gradual shift in the dominant way of regrouping communication according to the function or purpose of that communication, less and less according to the larger social identity of the persons engaged in the communication. The multiple sub- narratives of modernization discussed above are symptomatic of this shift. They include the superseding of older forms of dominant differentiation, namely stratification, and the putting in their place of a different view of what is of primary importance: no longer the ‘glory’ of certain strata, but discovery, enlightenment, freedom, (national) fraternity, equality and, for religious carriers, conversion. What is at issue is a reorientation of the primary differentiation of European society towards instrumental, func- tional priorities. The semantic or ideological correlates of this transformation put people, especially in the form of increasingly differenti- ated and lionized individuals, at once in the foreground and in the background. They are conceived as autonomous from the developing
systems, but the individuals nonetheless distinguish themselves, gain their individuality, mostly in terms of one or a very few of the systems, the progress of which (parallel to the glory of the upper strata or the core) is most fundamentally at issue. This autonomous yet dependent status then throws up the peculiar and persistent question of the relation between individual and society, of Simmel’s famous question of how social order can be possible (Simmel 1971). It is this relative abstraction from concrete people, this de-personalization of the more and more dominant functional subunits of society, that, along with adaptive upgrading, allowed these systems to become the carriers of a very different kind of expansion and globalization.
Two characteristics of these systems are of central importance in this regard. First, as in core/periphery and stratified differentiation, the subsys- tems are asymmetrically structured, meaning that they are both unlike each other and yet profoundly dependent on each other. Just as nobilities are quite different from peasantries and yet are interdependent, so are capitalist economy, political state system, scientific system and so forth quite different from one another and yet each assumes the operation of the others in its social environment. Historically, these systems emerged in tandem, each providing some of the conditions for the possibility of the development of the others (cf. e.g. Huff 2003). The order among the func- tion systems is not, however, hierarchical in any clear sense, even if especially economistic visions of modern society have tried to see them that way. Capitalist economy requires for its functioning political and legal regulation in its environment, technological applications of scientific knowledge, schools for credentialled personnel, and other systems; but these latter are not thereby simply superstructural reflections of that economy. They operate on the basis of their own logic and structure, and are similarly dependent on the rest for their development and proper func- tioning. This inequality without hierarchical relation has yielded, among