For a long time, Hans-Jürgen Puhle has worked as a historian and political scientist on two major topics in comparison: the different development paths of individual societies and states into modernity since the end of the 18th century. He has also focused on the development and transformation of organized politics and the political public sphere in the processes of interventionist statehood and mass democracy, especially between the qualitative leap of modernization and expansion of political organization at the end of the 19th century and a similarly drastic change a hundred years later in the wake of information technology, increased fragmentation, and transnational and global networking and dissolution of boundaries. The essays collected in this volume cover four decades of social and political developments in Germany, West and South.