The breakdown of the European regimes of state socialism and the subsequent efforts to establish a new social order in its former domain are arguably the most consequential, as well as most fascinating, historical events in the authors' adult lifetime. What we want to understand in this comparative study is not so much the breakdown of the old order, but the problematic emergence of the new. To that end, we look at three groups of phenomena and their causal interconnection. These phenomena can be located on a time axis. First, we have the material legacies, constraints, and set of habits and cognitive frames that are inherited from the past regime (as well as the social and cultural conditions preceding it), as well as from the mode of its sudden and unpredicted disintegration. Second, we see a turbulent configuration of new actors and new opportunities for action; they emerge as the old regime loses its repressive grip on society. Third, we see – or rather still partly anticipate – a new consolidated institutional order under which agency is institutionalized and a measure of sustainability (or “consolidation”) of these agency-shaping institutions is achieved. Thus the breakdown, transformation actors, and new and (more or less) consolidated regimes are the three phenomena we encounter along the transformation path. The causal links that connect the (in)stabilities of institutional outcomes to actors, and actors to the constraints, opportunities, and preferences inherited from and inherent in the original conditions of the breakdown of the old regime will together form the focus of this book.