In philosophy, society is defined as a “dynamic system”. The word "system" is translated from Greek as "a whole consisting of parts." Society as a dynamic system includes parts, elements, subsystems interacting with each other, as well as relations and relations between them. It changes, develops, new ones appear and old parts or subsystems disappear, they mutate, acquire new forms and qualities.
Society as a dynamic system has a complex multi-level structure and includes a large number of levels, sublevels, elements. For example, human society on a global scale includes many societies in the form of different states, which in turn consist of various social groups, and a person is included in them.
The structure of society consists of four subsystems, which are the main areas of human activity - political, economic, social and spiritual. Each sphere has its own structure and is also itself a complex system. So, for example, the political sphere is a system that includes a huge number of components - parties, government, parliament, public organizations and more. But government can also be seen as a system with many components.
Each sphere of society is a subsystem in relation to the whole society, but at the same time it is a rather complex system. Thus, we already have a hierarchy of the systems and subsystems themselves, that is, in other words, society is a complex system of systems, a kind of super-system, or, as they sometimes say, a metasystem.
Society as a complex dynamic system is characterized by the presence in its composition of various elements, both material (buildings, technical systems, institutions, organizations) and ideal (ideas, values, customs, traditions, mentality). For example, the economic subsystem includes organizations, banks, transport, manufactured goods and services, and at the same time, economic knowledge, laws, values, and more.
Society as a dynamic system contains a special element, which is its main, system-forming element. This is a person with free will, the ability to set a goal and choose the means to achieve this goal, which makes social systems more mobile, dynamic than, say, natural ones.
The life of society as a social system is constantly in a state of movement. The pace, scope, and quality of these changes may vary; in the history of the development of mankind there was a time when the established order of things did not basically change for centuries, however, over time, the pace of change began to grow. Compared with natural systems in human society, qualitative and quantitative changes are much faster, which suggests that society is constantly changing and is in development.
Society, as, indeed, any system, is an ordered integrity. This means that the elements of the system are inside it in a certain position and are more or less connected with other elements. Therefore, society as an integrated dynamic system has a certain quality that characterizes it as a single whole, having a property that does not have any of its elements. This property is sometimes called system non-additivity.
Society as dynamic the system is characterized by another feature, which is that it belongs to the number of self-governing and self-organizing systems. This function belongs to the political subsystem, which gives coherence and harmonious correlation to all the elements that form a social holistic system.