This book is about the radical novelty of modern polities in a functionally differentiated world society. Premodern states were at the apex of a stratified, hierarchical society. They dominated society and all its groups and strata. Modern polities have to be understood through the ecology of relations among different function systems. They have to find and incessantly redefine their place in society. They produce decisions that are collectively binding, but in preparing these decisions experience constraints and knowledge deficiencies that are related to the complexity of a functionally differentiated society. The book concentrates on six analytical perspectives that reflect how modern polities are embedded into 21st century society. These perspectives are: the concept of inclusion and the inclusion revolution constitutive of modern polities; the internal differentiation of polities that endows them with an unprecedented complexity; the fact that polities do not know anything about society and the ways in which they compensate for this; representation and responsiveness as strategies to reconnect with society; the self-restriction of some polities that brings about ever new autonomous expert organizations; the symmetrical rise of autocracies and democracies as the two modern variants of political regimes.

Anna Lisa Ahlers, born in 1982, leads the Lise Meitner Research Group 'China in the Global System of Science' at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She was associate professor of Modern Chinese Society and Politics at the University of Oslo, Norway, from 2014-2020, and is a member of the Junge Akademie of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Leopoldina. Damien Krichewsky, born in 1982, is a research fellow at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (Bonn). After completing a dissertation at Sciences Po in Paris, he was granted a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Society in Cologne. He has carried out research on topics such as Corporate Social Responsibility in India, the use of green finance as a tool of environmental aid in Egypt, and socio-ecological transformation in relation to the environmental governance of the Ganges in India's democracy. Evelyn Moser, born in 1982, studied political sciences and economics in Mainz and Moscow. She holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Lucerne and is currently a research fellow at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft (Bonn). Her research interests include the sociology of political regimes, economic sociology, the sociology of organizations, and the analysis of societal change in the post-Soviet sphere. Rudolf Stichweh, born in 1951, is a professor of sociology at Forum Internationale Wissenschaft and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. His primary fields of research are the theory of world society and functional differentiation, the comparative study of democracies and autocracies, the history and sociology of science and universities, the study of inequality and asymmetrical dependencies in human societies, the sociology of the stranger.