A comprehensive and detailed account of the history of personalism - the system of thought that maintains the primacy and uniqueness of the human or divine person, on the basis that reality only has meaning through the conscious mind. While most of the focus is on philosophical figures, Bengtsson treats personalism as a worldview, rather than a single doctrine, and notes that it was a broad intellectual movement with wider cultural influences. It is a key virtue of the book to bring together a large range of thinkers, over a long period of time, who worked in a variety of languages.