The debate about values plays a significant role in sciencescience and politics time and again. Somewhat simplified, one can distinguish four approaches in these discussions. Politicians invoke many lofty values in Sunday speeches; more conservatively oriented authors and researchers lament a general decline in values;decline in values leftists fight against socially divisive liberalist values; most sociologists seem to stay out of this debate altogether. This introductory chapter will briefly address the first three approaches, the fueling of the political debate by the immigration of people from Muslim countries, the conservative diagnoses of value decline, and the thesis of the enforcement of liberalist, inequality-promoting values. Then, in a preliminary form, it will be more precisely determined what fundamental societal values are and what a sociological analysis should look like that takes them seriously. Finally, an overview of the content of this volume is given.