World Order, Visions of

Early Visions

The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss found that totemic classifications support the view [Page 1814]that all societies provide a comprehensive frame of thought that defines the ethical and cognitive aspects of human action, locates human beings within the natural world, and provides justifications for social organization, in particular the distribution of power and authority.

With the rise of the great historical civilizations, that frame of thought became the focus for specialists—whether poets, priests, or philosophers—who worked to create a coherent statement of its central tenets. The more powerful the social unit was, and the more extensive and durable its rule, the more likely it was to have inserted a vision of world order into what is now the record of world history.

Even a cursory examination of the world visions of the great historical civilizations will dispel the idea that there might be a set of simple formulae from which one can derive all possible orders. The two most durable cases, the Indian Hindu and the Chinese Confucian visions, make an instructive contrast. In the Confucian case, the five sacred human relations made the emperor the pivot of the administrative hierarchy, the mediator between heaven and earth, and the source of stability and prosperity of the middle kingdom. In the Hindu case, the classic system of four castes plus untouchables provided for a social hierarchy allowing the intellectual cadre, the Brahmins, to exercise and enjoy the benefits of collective power, in whatever political regime.

In a third great vision of world order, the Islamic, there is provision for multiple holders of political power, operating within a broad conception of the umma, the great community of believers. That community transcends state boundaries and observes the rules and principles on which any good society must be based. It is potentially coextensive with a world order within which nonbelievers can be accommodated.

Finally, the Christian vision of a tension between a spiritual world belonging to God and the mundane political order has variously, at different times, legitimized power, underpinned opposition to power, and promoted the development of purely secular ideas of world order, devoid of any religious content. The most celebrated account in the 14th century by the Italian poet and philosopher Dante, De Monarchia, rejected a world of powers united under a single spiritual leadership of the pope in favor of a single world state of Christians under an emperor.

Western Enlightenment Visions

It was in the context of Western enlightenment in the 18th century that ideas of a universal order in human affairs, transcending differences in religion and state boundaries, became an independent focus of intellectual interest. Several factors had combined to undermine medieval Christianity's visions of a world order. Science freed itself from church control. The breakdown of papal authority in the Reformation and the social unrest associated with the new religious beliefs created a confused political field of forces and religious wars. Increasing contact through seaborne exploration and colonization with non-European cultures emphasized the extent of the non-Christian world.

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