ABSTRACT
Part I of this book, and Parts II and III of the previous volume (Szakolczai 1998a), have mapped the life trajectories of six major thinkers who can be considered as main protagonists of reflexive historical sociology. The analysis so far has been formal, in the sense of reconstructing as far as possible the decisive experiences and personal or intellectual encounter events that stamped their work, giving it shape and direction, and the changes that occurred at that basic level, due to novel encounter-experiences or intensive reflections on their own works. The aim of such a formal analysis was to restore the proper frameworks and contours of the work, assign emphases and to punctuate the dynamics of the work by letting it retrieve its own rhythm.
