La "società del genere umano": Una parabola semantica

The essay presents a brief, three-steps, history of the concept of society of mankind. The first step goes back to the etymological roots and to some ancient uses of the term γένος (génos); it also dwells on the idea of mankind in Greek thought, and finally shows why this idea did not merge with that of a unique society which unites all human beings. The second one proposes a comparison between the Stoic notion of cosmopolitanism and the notion of society of mankind (societas humani generis) which Cicero elaborated for the first time and passed on to Western philosophy. The third one focuses on the concept of society recently proposed by N. Luhmann in the framework of a theory of social systems, according to which it is plausible to conceive human beings as belonging not to society, but to the external environment. As counterintuitive as this idea might seem, it allows us to describe the increasingly dramatic problem of social inclusion and exclusion in a more rigorous way.