Wilhelm von Humboldt

On the limits of state action

In January 1789, Wilhelm von Humboldt joined the Prussian civil service as a law clerk to the Supreme

Court of Berlin, but left this post after only a year. His impending marriage to Karoline von

Dacheröden, the daughter of the President of the Prussian Council in Erfurt, was certainly not the only

motive for his departure; in fact, the reason lay much deeper and can be traced to Humboldt’s sceptical

view of the exercise of State power in general and not merely of rule by an absolute monarch. Since

1790 he had been working on a publication entitled ‘Ideas for an endeavour to define the limits of state

action’ which was completed in 1792, but not published in full until long after his death. The section

dealing with education was already published in the December 1792 issue of the Berlinische

Monatsschrift under the title ‘On public state education’. Humboldt thus took part in the discussion on

the shaping of national education which was in progress in Germany, as elsewhere after the French

Revolution.

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In this publication, tight limits are placed on the State; its action should be confined to

protection of the citizen within its frontiers and against attacks from outside. Humboldt advocated the

greatest possible freedom for the individual in an environment in which ‘each individual, depending on

his own needs and inclinations and bounded only by the limits of his own energy’ must be allowed to

develop according to his own innate personality (GS, I, p. 111). He was afraid that State influence on

education would ‘always favour one particular form’; this was particularly deleterious if it ‘relates to

man as a moral being [...] and ceases altogether to have any beneficial action if the individual is

sacrificed to the citizen’ (GS, I, p. 143). ‘Without regard to certain civic forms which must be imparted

to men, the sole purpose of education must be to shape man himself’ (GS I, p. 145). Humboldt

reversed the role of the State: ‘Education of the individual must everywhere be as free as possible,

taking the least possible account of civic circumstances. Man educated in that way must then join the

State and, as it were, test the Constitution of the State against his individuality’ (GS, I, p. 144). In

Humboldt’s view, man is not the object of the State but must be a subject who himself helps to shape

conditions within society.

Humboldt subscribed to the educational policy notions of Count Mirabeau in calling for public

education to ‘take place entirely outside the limits [...] within which the State must confine its own

activities’ (GS, I, p. 146). He made repeated reference to Mirabeau’s ‘Discourse on National

Education’ and quoted him in a footnote: ‘Education will be good to the extent that it suffers no

outside intervention; it will be all the more effective, the greater the latitude left to the diligence of the

teachers and the emulation of their pupils’ (GS, I, p. 146). Elsewhere in this treatise on constitutional

theory, Humboldt expressed his views on the duties of parents and on their responsibility ‘to raise

children [...] to complete maturity’ (GS, I, p. 225). He even called upon the State to ‘safeguard the

rights of children against their parents’ so that ‘parental authority does not exceed normal bounds’

(GS, I, p. 226). This emphasis on the rights of the child reveals the influence of Rousseau and the

expressly formulated goal of the harmonious general education of each individual. The ‘true purpose of

man’ can only be ‘the highest and best proportioned development of his abilities into a harmonious

entity’ To attain that goal, human development requires freedom but also a confrontation with

‘manifold situations’ since ‘however free and independent a man may be, he will develop less

satisfactorily if his only experience is of monotonous situations’ (GS, I, p. 106).

Humboldt adhered to this educational goal in his own lifetime, but his views on the influence of

the State on education underwent a fundamental change during the period in which he headed the

Prussian educational administration.

After his resignation from the civil service, Wilhelm von Humboldt resided mostly on estates in

Thuringia which belonged to his parents-in-law and also in Erfurt or Jena. Both the Humboldts

established close contacts with the Weimar circle of poets. Wilhelm became a particular friend of

Friedrich von Schiller. This friendship found its literary reflection in an active correspondence.

After the death of their mother in 1796, Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt were left with

substantial properties that provided them with the resources to undertake extensive travel for

educational research. Many scientific works were the outcome of these journeys. Alexander was

always bent on acquiring a better knowledge of the world, while Wilhelm sought a deeper

understanding of man and his inner nature.

In the last decade of the eighteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote several of his most

important publications. He made ‘the search for the laws governing the development of human

energies on earth’ (GS, I, p. 93) the focal point of his scientific endeavours. He constantly enquired into

the purpose of human life and asked which type of education was necessary to attain that purpose. In

his study of classical antiquity, he debated the ‘indispensable need for knowledge’ in classical antiquity

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because ‘it is a precondition for focussing individual endeavour on a more general purpose, namely the

unity of the most noble purpose which is to shape man within the finest possible proportions’ (GS, I,

p. 261).