WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT’S personality was unique and many-sided,1 so that his intellectual development was not typical of changes taking place in the German intellectual climate of his time. But there are certainly aspects of Humboldt’s life and thought which are highly indicative of these transformations. An aristocrat, cosmopolitan in outlook, a friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller with whom he exchanged over a thousand letters,2 Humboldt on the eve of the invasion of Germany by revolutionary France shared fully in the Humanitätsideal. An active statesman in the Prussian reform administrations of Stein and Hardenberg after 1809, Humboldt participated in the new liberalism, which in the struggle against Napoleon affirmed national values against the principles of 1789. He no longer viewed the German nation as primarily a cultural community, but as one of political power.3 Throughout Humboldt’s life there is a thread of continuity with the cosmopolitan, humanistic orientation of his younger years, as well as a clear shift of emphasis toward the new national values.
Humboldt’s first political writings were stimulated by the French Revolution. He had visited Paris during the crucial months of 17894 and had assessed the developments in France more soberly than many other Germans. They, like his friend Friedrich Gentz, had first welcomed the upheaval with almost unbounded enthusiasm, only to turn as strongly against it. On the surface, his Ideas on an Attempt to Define the Limits of the State’s Sphere of Action of 1791, often considered the classic work on German Liberalism, proposes a state very similar to that of orthodox liberalism since Locke. The state is not an end in itself, but “a subordinated means, to which the true end, man, must not be sacrificed.”5 Its purpose is the protection of the fullest freedom of all individuals; its functions are to be reduced to the absolute minimum needed to protect the rights of the individual against violation from within and to guarantee his security against threats from without.6 Rejecting the totalitarian argument that the state must further the happiness of its citizens, Humboldt denies the state all positive functions, including a role in education, religion, or the improvement of morals.7 These and other functions might be required in society, he admits, but they should be the work of free, voluntary associations, not of the state. The state must not be identified with civil society (Nationalverein), Humboldt warns. The state is marked by coercion and the concentration of power; civil society, on the other hand, consists of a pluralism of groups, freely chosen by the individuals and subject to change.8 Not the state, but the voluntary institutions of a free society preserve and foster cultural values, according to Humboldt. The line dividing state and civil society therefore needs to be a clear one, with the state forbidden from interference in the private lives of its citizens. This assumes a state, governed by standing laws which guarantee the rights of the private individual against official interference.
But the theoretical foundations upon which Humboldt bases his concept of the state were very different from those of classical liberalism. The latter had sought a theoretical justification for individual liberties in a doctrine of natural law. It saw the sources of man’s humanity in his ability to think and thus to grasp the rational structure of the universe and of ethics. Classical liberalism viewed rights in terms of abstract, universal principles. It saw those characteristics as essentially human which were universal and uniform among men. But for Humboldt, as for Goethe, Schiller, or Herder, who also shared in the Humanitätsideal of German classicism, it was essential to man’s humanity that he develop his own unique individuality to its fullest. They shared the Enlightenment belief that man possessed a special dignity, but this dignity, they held, had to be understood in dynamic terms of individual growth. However, while they recognized that man’s dignity and end were prescribed by the nature of things or reason, they did not think that reason dictated clear rules for this development. Rather, man’s growth had to be governed by the inner nature of his peculiar individuality. Freedom from state interference was necessary because “man’s highest purpose—the one prescribed by eternal immutable reason, not by changing inclinations, (was) the highest and most proportioned development of his resources into one whole.”9 Yet this development was possible only when the state did not interfere with man’s natural development. The individual was a living organism; the state a mechanical tool which, through legislation, would impose external restraints upon natural growth.10 Man did not exist in a vacuum, Humboldt acknowledged, and in contrast to the state society was natural and necessary for the individual as he unfolded his “unique individuality” ( Eigentümlichkeit).11 Humboldt assumed that there was a basic harmony among individualities in growth and did not see in society as such, as distinct from the state, a significant source of constraint. Indeed, if the functions of the state were restricted to a minimum, then in his opinion the “highest ideal of the co-existence of human beings” could be attained; namely, that in which “every being develops not only out of himself and for his own sake.”12
Such a concept of individuality appears hardly compatible with the concept of equality in the classical sense. Indeed, certain important elements of classic liberal political theory are missing. There is nowhere any proposal for government by consent, nor for any system of checks and balances to control the power of the state. Indeed, because Humboldt conceives the state as unified and possessing “absolute power”13 and rejects the representative principle, he argues that the state’s functions must be limited to the bare minimum of preserving security. Because of the coercive character of the state, the positive social functions must be left to voluntary associations. Were the state to carry on positive functions, Humboldt maintains, it would require the consent of every individual, something very different from the majority will of its representatives.14
The Limits of the State constitutes a theoretical repudiation of the paternalistic welfare state, primarily that of the absolutistic Polizeistaat of eighteenth-century enlightened depotism, but in principle also of the revolutionary state. In no sense does the book contain a rejection of monarchy as such, or even of absolute monarchy. As Siegfried Kaehler has pointed out in his political biography of Wilhelm von Humboldt,15 Humboldt’s endorsement of the French Revolution never goes beyond the idea of liberty. Already in 1789, he viewed with misgivings the egalitarian aspects of the revolution. In his diary, he condemns the decisions of the night of August 4th, abolishing feudal rights in France, “when a number of nobles, most of them poor, gave away what belonged to the wealthy.” As he tells an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution:
I said that the deputies had no authority to renounce (these privileges), that the surrender of these privileges had come too quickly and had no useful but only harmful consequences since they nourished chimerical ideas of equality.16
Perhaps most strikingly in discord with classic liberal ideals is Humboldt’s glorification of war in the Limits of the State. Kant, too, had paid homage to the positive aspects of war.17 War and antagonism had stimulated human activities and hastened the development toward a civil society on rational foundations in which war would be abolished. But for Humboldt war is a desirable end in itself, a permanent feature of human societies, “one of the most wholesome manifestations that plays a role in the education of the human race.” He regretfully saw war assume a less and less important place in the modern world, and believed there is no substitute for it. War “alone gives to the total structure the strength and the diversity without which facility would be weakness and unity would be void.”18 Standing armies must be abolished not to dampen the warlike spirit but to spread it through the nation, to “inspire the citizen with spirit of true war.”19
Doubtless, this positive attitude toward war is related to Humboldt’s anti-eudaemonism, his rejection of personal welfare as the highest ethical good. This attack against “eudaemonism” is central to the thought of all the significant writers of the German historical tradition from Humboldt to Meinecke and of German Idealists from Kant to the Hegelians. “Happiness and pleasure,” Humboldt observes, “are far removed from the dignity of man. Man most enjoys those moments in which he experiences the highest degree of strength and inner unity. But at these times he is also closest to profound misery.”20 For Humboldt
