This book has compared the evolution of ideas on how a welfare state should look, as well as the institutionalization of these ideas in Italy and Germany, across three centuries. It showed that even the same religion can take very different roads to develop its ideas according to the different institutional (who can vote and under what electoral system) and political (the heatedness of the state–church conflict, the constellation, and number of political actors) conditions despite rather similar starting conditions. The book argues that these factors influence whether it comes to a virtuous or vicious cycle of competition of welfare state ideas. In a virtuous cycle there is an update of social security ideas, while in a vicious cycle no new ideas are generated. The welfare regime a country adopts is largely dependent on the ideational configuration and the dynamics that come with the cycle. There are some functional requirements that are needed to make a welfare state evolve, such as a certain level of industrialization (a cycle on modern state-driven welfare would not emerge in the Stone Age, for example), but only insofar as it puts the problem on the political agenda.