The book contains 16 chapters or essays that portray people from the Renaissance until the middle of the 20th century, focusing their attempts to discover and cultivate their individuality.
Among the people portrayed are Martin Luther, Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Søren Kierkegaard, Stefan George, Jean-Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Jünger and Ricarda Huch.
[1] Jens Balzer [de] of Deutschlandfunk Kultur wrote that the book is entertaining and clever, and manages to give a sense of intellectual evolution without trying to force its subjects into a conceived progress.
He criticised the book's historical scope, as its chronology ends with Jünger's The Forest Passage [de] from 1951, thus omitting important later developments even in the thinkers it portrays.
[2] Thomas Ribi of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote that the chapters about Stendhal, Kierkegaard and Huch are masterpieces.