The figure of the stranger is one of the most universal semantics in the history of human societies. Through this figure, societies observe their boundaries, establish identities, and mark threats. Rudolf Stichweh traces the trail of the stranger in various social systems and guiding themes: in the context of strangeness and the self-limitation of humanity, in the identification of the stranger through physical characteristics, his prominence in universities and science, his relationship to Europe's self-description, and in the diverse forms of the vagabond and the peripheral in the early modern period. In modernity, a transformation occurs in which everyone else is foreign or no one is a stranger. The self-observation of modernity, a central thesis of this book, invents forms of minimal sympathy and universal indifference that influence our relationship with all.