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The human world is changing. Old social structures are being overwhelmed by forces of social transformation which are sweeping across political and cultural frontiers. A social animal is becoming the social species. The animal that lives in packs and herds (family, corporation, nation, state) is becoming a member of a human society which is the society of all human beings, the society of all societies. The age-old problems of social life - religious, philosophical, moral, political, legal, economic - must now be addressed at the level of the whole species, and the level where all cultures and traditions meet and will contribute to an exhilarating and hazardous new form of human self-evolving. In this book Philip Allott explores the social and legal implications and potentialities of these developments in the light of the general theory of society and law which is proposed in his groundbreaking Eunomia: New Order for a New World

Abstract
British history shows that Britain has always been internationalist by necessity and by choice, with a belief in the Rule of Law as the basis of all public order, national and international. The human world is facing existential challenges which require new conceptions of international society and the international Rule of Law to which Britain is exceptionally well placed to contribute.

Sovereignty is often invoked by Brexiters, yet it is an increasingly slippery concept in a globalised world, where the demands of trade and diplomacy force states to compromise their independence. Philip Allott argues that the EU's lack of a common identity has enabled sovereignty to be deployed as a patriotic concept.

War is the mass murder of human beings and the mass destruction of cities in the public interest. It is as old as recorded human history. This leads people to suppose that war is a natural human phenomenon, part of our evolutionary genetic inheritance. But wars are the work of states, which do not have an evolutionary genetic inheritance. Wars are simply a form of collective human evil. Traditional diplomacy, as the manipulation of relations between states, connives in that evil. States are systems of ideas which include more or less sophisticated justifications of war. The human mind has evolved in three cognitive stages over the course of human history. Those stages are diachronic, co-existing through time. The third cognitive state of the human mind allows us now to make a world without war. But the sordid justifications of war persist and, in the 21st century, are being strengthened by the emerging of new forms of old atavisms. They can only be overcome by a revival of the ancient idea of the essential unity of humanity.

An anthropology of law is a useful method for diagnosing the mental health of a given society. The sad state of the idea of international law has made, and has been made by, the sickness of international society. Social forms are products of the human imagination. Throughout the whole of recorded human history, the self-socialising human mind has struggled to find ways to overcome the natural self-corrupting tendency of government and law, a pathological process in which the governors and the governed are liable to be co-conspirators. For better and worse, the European mind has played a leading part in the long story of the making of social forms, national and international, including the self-destructive mythology of the international system, dominated by the social forms of diplomacy and war. Since 1945, the European mind has abdicated its global intellectual responsibility, as it has constructed an inadequately imagined system of law and government in Europe, a state without a society – an ominous precedent. In the new social situation, national and international, of the twenty-first century, the human mind will imagine new ideas of law and government, new ideas of international society and international law.