Introduzione. Pensare lo Stato mondiale

This introduction reconstructs the rich and often contradictory debates surrounding the idea of a world state from the late nineteenth century to the present. Far from being a merely speculative fantasy, the world state has been imagined as a utopian project of peace, a logical outcome of technological and economic integration, and a dystopian danger to individual and collective freedom. After revisiting the curious attempts by twentieth-century anthropologists to predict the exact date of global political unification, the introduction outlines the emergence of the world state as a modern concept shaped by imperial expansion, global war, and the crisis of sovereignty. It then presents the contributions of the volume, which examine a diverse range of thinkers — from Wells, Jünger and Toynbee to Kelsen, Kojève and Schmitt — who engaged with the promises and perils of a global political authority. While not advocating for or against the feasibility of a world state, the introduction argues that examining these debates offers a privileged vantage point from which to reassess the transformations of sovereignty, order and power in a technologically unified but politically fragmented global age.