The question of why people subordinate themselves to others is one of the oldest inquiries in political theory and remains one of its fundamental topics to this day. Human action seems inevitably shaped by power relations. In the social sciences, the question of power is posed in a variety of ways: What is power, in fact? Does it relate to human nature? In what forms does power manifest? What role does it play in politics? Would politics function at all without power? Is the exercise of power always repressive? How is power controlled in the modern state? This introductory volume addresses these questions particularly through the concepts of key modern theorists of power: Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Niklas Luhmann, and Heinrich Popitz.