One of the greatest challenges faced today by the social sciences is how to understand the world as essentially one single community. But despite all recent efforts in this direction, why has this proved so hard to achieve? This book responds to this question by offering a meditation on the many difficulties involved in articulating a coherent conception of a world community, trying to explain how these problems have emerged and why they seem so unsurmountable. By situating different historical conceptions of world community in the context of changing cosmological beliefs, I hope to show that the idea of world community once constituted the default setting of political thought and action, and thus not only antedated but also effectively conditioned the emergence of our modern and bounded forms of community. By making the latter look like a historical parenthesis, I hope to restore some sense of familiarity to a time when these modern sources of human belonging and fulfilment have been lost.

So, by its very nature, this book is based on intuition rather than on conviction. As such, it has grown out of random encounters with many sources which have traditionally attracted little or no interest from students of international political thought. Yet the very same reason why these sources have frequently been overlooked is precisely what makes them crucial to my present endeavour: they do not assume that communities have to be bounded or that authority has to be centralized for political order to be possible and viable. Instead, they point to those characteristics that draw human beings together in the hope of making both these requirements forever redundant.