Teiji Takagi one of the leading number theorists of this century, is most renowned as the founder of class field theory. This volume reflects the stages of his development of this theory. Inspired by a genial idea related to analytic number theory, he developed a beautiful general theory of abelian extensions of algebraic number fields which he addressed at the ICM 1920 at Strasbourg. This report ends with a problem to generalize the results to the case of normal, not necessarily abelian extensions. Up to now this problem has stimulated research. This second edition incorporates the whole...