The relationships between German intellectuals and politics at the turn of the nineteenth century have been much debated, with the nature of the German liberal tradition at the core of controversy, and with questions about the interconnections between liberalism, nationalism, and neohumanist Bildung circling not far beyond that core. Prominent in such discussions stands the figure of the Prussian scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt. Best known today variously for his part in overhauling the Prussian educational system during the “reform era” of Chancellors Stein and Hardenberg, or for helping to establish the disciplines of classical philology and comparative linguistics, Humboldt also authored one of the seminal texts in the European liberal tradition and was actively involved in the diplomacy, constitutional planning, and nationalist upheaval surrounding Napoleon's expulsion from Germany and the subsequent construction of the German Confederation.

This essay aims to contribute to these debates precisely through its reinterpretation of Humboldt's well-known roles in the origins of German liberalism, nationalism, and Philhellene classicism. This revised portrait hinges upon a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between progressive liberal and ancient republican political languages, in the emerging liberal doctrines of the early nineteenth century, and in the changing and conflicted views of ancient Greek social and political life outlined by Humboldt himself. But even more, this new analysis of Humboldt's liberalism and nationalism turns upon exploration of Humboldt's much less well-known encounter with the small Pyrenean nationality of the Basques in the years around 1800.

Historians have typically seen eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German liberalism as relatively weak, particularly as it developed in a rather rarefied intellectual and attenuated social environment, promoted by inexperienced literati and lacking any solid social base in a well-established middle class. It has been judged ideologically deficient as well, its focus on individual aesthetic cultivation or Bildung and its reluctance to call for any great degree of citizen participation of the classical republican sort as a check or alternative to royal bureaucratic government seeming to follow both from that contextual grounding and from a traditional German reliance upon the state, in either event justifying charges that German intellectuals were by and large quietist and apolitical—retreating from the distasteful bustle of politics and accepting of the status quo. The addition of anti-French nationalism to the political mix in the wake of Napoleon, while it called some intellectuals into more active political life, seemed only to intensify their adherence to monarchical rule. The absolute character of that government could ultimately only be tempered by the adoption of the jurisprudential ideal of the Rechtsstaat as the just, not arbitrary administration of the nation in a framework of legal equality; monarchy itself was still needed to realize the nationalist ideal of harmonious Volk unity. From either perspective, chauvinistic nationalism seemed to undermine liberal self-assertion or popular sovereignty of the pluralist participatory sort, and to endanger individual rights through its apotheosis of the national community.Footnote ¹

In debating the meaning and significance of Humboldt's liberalism and nationalism, opinions abound on the question of when Humboldt “discovered the nation,” and of the relationship between this discovery and the scheme of liberal politics he had outlined in the wake of the French Revolution. Depending on the scholar's general assessment of Humboldt's liberal and nationalist credentials, his adoption of nationalism has sometimes been seen as diminishing his early liberalism, or his liberalism as checking his nationalism, or both at once, or neither. The latter option has proven particularly popular, with Humboldt's early theory of Bildung dismissed as a withdrawal from real-world political commitment that left the Prussian state unchallenged, and his later ideas deemed a typically German embrace of the strong state as the highest political and ethical value.Footnote ²

In what follows I reexamine these issues of Humboldt's German politics through a perhaps surprising dual focus upon his fragmentary observations about the classical Greeks and his little-studied writings about the Basques. Insofar as the Greek case served as the locus classicus for Humboldt's theories of Bildung, he naturally felt compelled to consider it when he came to define the relationship between the state and Bildung in the modern world, and he therefore had to come to terms with the at once attractive and repulsive ancient republican tradition. For Humboldt, as for many political thinkers in the wake of the Scottish Enlightenment, the central social and political problem involved the confrontation—and possibly the reconciliation—of the rights-based Lockean jurisprudential tradition of protective liberty with the more participatory civic humanist tradition, where unease about the modern balance of self-interest and patriotism, commercial prosperity and virtuous austerity, helped to set the language and direction of political discourse and contestation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote ³ The Basque researches in turn reveal a crucial intermediate phase in the development of Humboldt's ideas.Footnote ⁴ Observation of the self-governing institutions of the Spanish monarchy's Basque provinces, and of the vibrant national culture that buttressed them, went far toward helping him overcome his earlier opposition to unleashing classical-style national sentiment in the political and cultural context of modern Europe. Having traced the development of Humboldt's thinking about liberty, community, and the relationships between them in these early texts, the essay then scrutinizes the ways in which he adapted these ideas to the situation of post-Napoleonic Germany and Prussia in his political plans of the period 1809–19. Ultimately, the essay should make clear that Humboldt's increasing recourse to certain concepts of nationhood did not undermine his early liberalism, but rather changed its character, at once making it more institutionally robust and bringing it more in line with the principles of the Stein-Hardenberg reform era and the emerging mainstream of the post-Lockean, post-civic humanist tradition of European liberalism.

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The reception of Greek antiquity in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Germany, though much-studied, has tended to be seen as an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon, its preoccupation with self-cultivation if anything taken as evidence of the apolitical nature of contemporary German intellectual life. Perhaps for this reason, relatively little attention has been devoted to investigating the reception's political ramifications, and even less to querying the role of the ancient republican tradition itself in that time and place. The principal exception, Fania Oz-Salzberger's brilliant exegesis of the ways in which the Scottish civic humanism of Adam Ferguson was (mis)translated into German and Germany, has seemed to confirm the rather meager extent of that role, insofar as German political thinkers did not seem to know what to do with that tradition. Almost none of them, apparently, were able to accept that social and political conflict could be healthy for society, and they almost unconsciously translated that doctrine's notion of civically active self-cultivation into the existing German languages of Pietist self-perfection or a related aesthetic notion of individual Bildung (each predicating a rather socially disengaged interiority). Obedient citizen-subjects of a strong state that protected individual rights and left individuals free to pursue their self-development (the jurisprudential approach)—that was the German ideal into the nineteenth century, against which ideas of citizen militias, participatory liberty, and a style of patriotism arising from rough-and-tumble debate among interest groups in a diverse civil society made little impression. Interestingly, Oz-Salzberger mentions both Humboldt and Stein as possible exceptions, as figures who did speak in a more civic idiom.Footnote ⁵ The story is actually more complex, and at least with Humboldt, changing views of nationalism after the later 1790s played a central part. Initially, Humboldt's understanding of the implications of national sentiment led him away from either the French or classical models of republican government (appealing though the latter was), suggesting instead another way to protect individual liberty and Bildung against the homogenizing forces of royal power, state bureaucracy, or overweening national patriotism. By the 1800s, however, both nationalism and citizen participation would come to seem integral to a system of protective liberty and individual self-formation.

Even before Humboldt could be deemed a nationalist in any sense of the word, he recognized the importance of nationality as a factor in social, cultural, and political life. His early essay of 1791 on the French Revolution (written when he was only twenty-four) already deployed the concept of nationhood in a rather historicist way to oppose the philosophic politics of the revolutionaries. Humboldt rejected attempts to design a constitution on the basis of universal reason alone, arguing instead that differences of national character according to time and place insure that no constitution could be so generally applicable. He saw this national character as an expression of “forces” or “powers” deep-seated within nations and their component individuals, but he still thought that within limits they could be acted upon through political habits and institutions. In a somewhat Montesquieuan way, constitutions at once shaped and were shaped by national character and customs (as grounded in the powers), hence the naturalness of national character did not negate the efficacy of politics.Footnote ⁶ Established early, at no point in his later career did Humboldt abandon this belief in the inextricable and reciprocal link between political institutions and national character.

Yet for all that the young Humboldt obviously recognized the existence of national character and its potential significance for politics, nationality as a concept did not lie at the center of his concerns, or at any rate did so only in a negative way. It was rather the encounter with the classical tradition that helped to structure Humboldt's account, nationhood primarily entering the picture as one aspect of otherwise admirable ancient political arrangements that had to be kept at bay in the modern world. Above all Humboldt wanted to avoid an ancient republican-style patriotism, which in the ancient context had wondrously promoted the glory and greatness of classical civilizations and individuals, but which in the sturdier framework of modern political and social institutions would surely extinguish the already weakened flicker of free thought and individuality to be found there. In many ways it was in deciding which elements from a strongly attractive classical tradition could be safely adapted to modern circumstances that Humboldt was able to arrive at the early system of liberalism found in his treatise of 1792, The Limits of State Action. The true purpose of government was to promote the Bildung, or self-formation, of the individual, yet if the ancient republics had done so by directly molding the individuals, the best thing that a modern government could do was to interfere as little as possible. Ultimately the state should restrict itself to providing only for the security of its citizens as the optimum means of promoting the individual's independent formation of character and avoiding the dangers of conformity.Footnote ⁷

Humboldt expressed this whole complex of ideas about individual Bildung in the lines that would later inspire John Stuart Mill: “For this Bildung, freedom is the first and indispensable condition. Yet besides freedom, the development of human powers requires something else still, although something closely connected to freedom: diversity of situations.”Footnote ⁸ While the ultimate goal of Bildung was for the individual to develop a vibrant and unique character, that process could only occur through dialectical encounter with other, different, individuals and things. Humboldt shared the hallmarks of classic liberalism: a conviction that the state's primary task was the protection of citizens' rights, and that the ideal citizen be an autonomous, rational individual. But if Humboldt had already made the classic liberal move to an individualist society and a minimalist state, he had also already made the classic German move to an aestheticization of political categories. On the cusp of an age of dialectical historicism, Humboldt's individuals had to be just that—individual, or eigentümlich in the favored German phrase. They had to resolve the same fundamental dichotomy as did works of art, between Einheit and Mannigfaltigkeit, or unity and diversity, precisely through their individuality. Since for Humboldt as for others at this time the world was one of Becoming more than Being, energeia more than ergon, individuals had to strive actively and continuously to maintain a basic unity of character amid the flux of life. In political terms this meant that Humboldt was much more concerned with individual activity, with the process of living, than with the results of that activity or the form of that life. That is one way of stating the basic inversion of political theory that Humboldt was trying to carry out, taking individual activity—Bildung—to be itself the true end of politics, not just the political means to some other communal goal. Or couched in terms of an opposition more familiar to political debate then and since, Humboldt valued liberty over happiness, civic humanist moral strength and virtù over wealth and prosperity.Footnote ⁹

In searching for the best preconditions for such a Bildung, Humboldt could well have turned to rather than away from the classical ideal. Even before his subsequent role in the development of German Hellenist neohumanism, the Humboldt of 1792 felt that there was something inspiring about the Greeks and their character. The Greek republics, for example, had made the education of their citizens a central concern, much more so than modern states had. “The ancients,” he thought, “cared for the power and Bildung of the man as man; the moderns for his prosperity, his possessions, and his capacity to earn.”Footnote ¹⁰ In important ways the ancients thus presaged Humboldt's belief that government should concern itself with individual strength and activity rather than with the material results of that activity, with virtù rather than eudaemonia. Even as it ran some risk of producing uniformity through state control, this focus on individual Bildung offered countervailing opportunities for the growth of individual judgment and breadth as opposed to efficient but mind-numbing specialization. Individuality and independence were also encouraged insofar as the political institutions were indeed republican—any sacrifice of freedom in the private sphere could simply be recouped as the exercise of liberty in the political realm. Above all, the ancient institutions encouraged the development of sheer energy and activity, always the essential foundation for any true individuality or Bildung, whereas modern institutions tended to enervate or weaken the individual through the corrupting results-focused materialism and stifling regulations of eudaemonic bureaucratic rule, so familiar to Humboldt from his own disenchanting experience of civil service in the cameralist Prussian bureaucracy.Footnote ¹¹

Given that the Greeks seemed to have achieved at least a degree of harmonious Bildung, and for several reasons Humboldt could pinpoint, classical republican policy might be thought to have paid dividends in the past and to promise more in the future. And Humboldt certainly seemed to apply aspects of the ancient republican tradition as mediated through European civic humanism to the modern context. In this regard it is not surprising to find Humboldt singing the praises of citizen militias and even of war itself in steeling individual citizen character and producing more well-rounded personalities. Such an emphasis on militant patriotism is problematic in the more pacific and commercial natural law tradition but makes sense if Humboldt is indeed drawing from and not just dismissing that of the ancient republicans.Footnote ¹² The recognition of the value of citizen participation in politics as a vehicle for the cultivation of individual excellence (rather than a distraction from it) was another such instance, truer perhaps in this case to the original formulation of the idea in Aristotle than to the Machiavellian heritage as such.

But there were some fundamental reasons why at this stage in his political and intellectual career Humboldt could not accept classical republics as models for the modern world. First of all, the late eighteenth century was already witnessing the unravelling of the civic humanist “Machiavellian moment” amid a rising historicism.Footnote ¹³ While historicism could certainly admit declinist views of history, including ones looking back to ancient Greece as a golden age, such thinking tended to be progressive in outlook. It was difficult to see why nations at a later stage of development should adopt institutions more suited to a primitive historical era. One of the pivotal questions surrounding the German reception of ancient Greece has always been that of whether the Greeks were to serve as models for imitation or simply for inspiration. Even for Humboldt, who was less sanguine about the linearity of historical progress, modern nations not only should not but could not in any real sense step outside the stream of historical development and imitate the Greeks. As already seen in the 1791 essay on the French revolutionary constitution, in the world of incipient historicism, the ideas and institutions of nations could not be transposed without further ado to other places, times, and peoples. If one must agree with a recent commentator that Humboldt's minimalist state of negative liberty was not intended as a defense of modern capitalism, it is also clear from his beliefs about nations and history that neither could it have represented any serious desire “to revive the culture of ancient Greece.”Footnote ¹⁴

Recourse to nascent historicism provides a more meta-level reason for Humboldt's unwillingness to accept the ancient republican model, but he offered other, more specific ones as well. If the idea that freedom was the “indispensable condition” for Bildung might seem to promote the adoption of such a constitution as the best way to establish liberty, that would be to misunderstand the kind of liberty, and the kind of liberalism, Humboldt had in mind. The other half of the definition of character formation quoted above involved the key term “diversity,” and at this stage of his intellectual development, Humboldt did not believe that a republic based on communitarian spirit could be instituted without sacrifice of that diversity; nor did he see any good reason to institute it despite that sacrifice. Even the so-energetic ancient Greeks, Humboldt thought at this point, still suffered from considerable one-sidedness and uniformity. The Greeks had not known the distinctions between public and private or state and civil society that had become such basic underpinnings of the modern world. Consequently, when they called upon a “civic spirit” and a civic education or civic religion to bolster their relatively weak political institutions, they exposed all aspects of life—political, cultural, and personal—to its homogenizing influence and were saved from suffocating conformity only by their strength as individuals. Among the moderns, on the other hand, individuals were already weak, and state institutions strong, which would make the effects of such a move all the more oppressive. “If therefore among the ancient nations greater energy compensated for the one-sidedness, so among the moderns the disadvantage of lesser energy is made even worse by one-sidedness.”Footnote ¹⁵ Ultimately, Humboldt could not accept the danger that that hard-won civil society, which was the very seat of the intersubjective diversity and exchange upon which Bildung was predicated, would be subsumed once again in the sphere of communitarian politics (as seemed to be occurring in revolutionary France).

It is true that, as a means of avoiding the overpowerful and homogenizing influence of the modern state, Humboldt proposed to leave many of society's activities to “national institutions” or a “national association,” a concept sometimes interpreted as at least a precursor of his later nationalism. Yet it seems clear that the term refers rather to a broad-based and diverse civil society set apart from state or nation, and was in fact conceived in rather pluralist fashion, with assorted voluntary associations taking on distinct functions. Instead of invoking an antique patriotic “spirit in the nation” to motivate such an association, Humboldt explicitly shunned that possibility. He relied rather on a notion of cooperative self-interest to produce the common interest, as individuals realized the need to work together in order to solve social problems beyond the reach of single citizens, an approach not unlike Tocqueville's “self-interest properly understood” in early nineteenth-century America.Footnote ¹⁶ Or, insofar as Humboldt delegated to this voluntarist national community many of the functions often assigned to government, one could also see this as fairly close to the Paineite libertarian tradition of a self-regulating society that obviates the need for a strong state—security was achieved in part through citizens acting together on their own behalf, not solely through the government. Humboldt did not use the language of the state of nature in the Limits, but he did deploy an often overlooked Lockean language of “contract” and liberty against the risk of state-induced uniformity, and in the present instance, the distinction between the “state constitution” and the “national association” clearly drew upon that tradition of the two social contracts (the first establishing society generally, the second the form of government).Footnote ¹⁷ At least in the case of Humboldt, the development of nineteenth-century liberalism involved a picking and choosing from older liberal and ancient republican traditions, or a blending of the two, however much scholars tend to emphasize the separation between the two strands of political thought.

Given that Humboldt has been a favorite target of historians keen to demonstrate the weakness of the German liberal tradition, it is important to note that Humboldt's scheme in no way committed him to an atomistic or apolitical individualism. In fact, it positively excluded either option. Humboldt's notion of individual Bildung emphatically required ties of sociability in order to work at all. If the individual had to have freedom of exploration in order to achieve self-formation of character, that individual also had to encounter other, different individuals in as intimate a way as possible for there to be anything to explore.Footnote ¹⁸ On both counts, that of liberty and of diversity, the modern tutelary state would destroy such a possibility. Far from atomistic, Humboldt's minimalist state was therefore in many ways an exercise in intersubjectivity.

Although his reconciliation with politics and the state at this stage of his career should not be pushed too far, some commentators have rightly extended this observation about sociability to discount the notion of an Olympian apolitical stance in Humboldt. It is certainly true that these intersubjective encounters did not have to take place within the framework of state institutions and were often better off taking place outside it, but Humboldt's rejection of the invasive classical participatory model of government and its driving national spirit did not at all entail a wholesale rejection of political activity as such.Footnote ¹⁹ Rather, it involved a large-scale transfer of political functions from the state to the voluntarist sphere of civil society through the aforementioned Nationalverein. And when citizens did serve the state (as many would), Humboldt simply thought it essential that their characters already be formed before they did so. In that case, rather than being crushed and homogenized by the strength of the modern bureaucratic state, they would be able to influence it in turn.Footnote ²⁰ At any rate, participation in government was not ruled out, and energetic public activity in society was positively necessary in Humboldt's liberal scheme of Bildung. To deem Humboldt unpolitical because he reapportioned public activity from state to society would be to leave the state's role in political life unquestioned in the very way that historians have criticized in the German tradition (and in Humboldt himself).

Worried about the need for revisions, Humboldt never saw the full text of the Limits into publication, and for several years he did indeed turn his back not just on the practice of politics but also on its theorization. This withdrawal can be seen in his very next endeavor, “On the Study of Classical Antiquity” of 1793. While the essay still sifted the relationship between ancient and modern for guidance concerning the pursuit of Bildung, the center of attention had decisively shifted from political to more purely cultural issues. Humboldt here displayed more of the positive image of the ancient Greeks for which he is usually noted, and he offered more nuanced reasons for the success of individual development within a primitive political and sociocultural matrix that might not at first have seemed so propitious for it. He did not, however, change his mind about the desirability of applying the classical republican model in the modern world. His political orientation remained seemingly unaltered through the shift of intellectual focus.

The “Classical Antiquity” essay also assumes importance in the present context because it marks the beginning of Humboldt's abiding fascination with the phenomenon of nationhood as the central aspect of Bildung and of human experience generally.Footnote ²¹ Humboldt henceforth treated the study of nationality as the prime basis for acquiring the knowledge about diverse humanity that was the first requisite of Bildung. The essay essentially tried to show why this was the case, and why if one cannot simultaneously learn about many nations in depth, one should choose the ancient Greeks as the preferred object of study. While Humboldt's theories of nationality continued to change with the years, even at this early stage he had established certain enduring features. Crucial for the relationship between nationhood and politics was his lasting conviction that the student of nationality should take into account all aspects of the life of the nation, including its external environment and historical circumstances, but especially its language, religion, literature and philosophy, art, and (not least) its political institutions.Footnote ²² Even later, when language came to seem more central to the interpretation and expression of nationality, Humboldt continued to emphasize the importance of political institutions as a formative influence on national character rather than merely a surface manifestation of it—as he had in 1791 in his essay on the French Revolution.

In explaining why Greek antiquity constituted a privileged object of study for Bildung, Humboldt generally revealed a more unalloyed appreciation of that world than in his earlier political writings. Echoes of his previous doubts certainly remained: he insisted even more upon the primitive nature of Greek antiquity, and he still descried a tendency toward uniformity among the ancients stemming from their “very decided national characters.” Yet on the whole Humboldt was much more inclined to stress the energy and diversity of Greek life and the greatness of its individuals. Greek primitiveness actually became a part of their charm as it allowed for their special synthesis of natural simplicity and cultured refinement, and for their focus on the development of personalities rather than possessions.Footnote ²³

Humboldt also offered some new explanations for the triumph of Greek Bildung over the threats to diversity found in ancient republics. First, he made things easier for himself by choosing Athens rather than Sparta as his paradigmatic Greek polity. While the latter of course had made a virtue out of uniformity, the Athenians had allowed much more room for individual expression. Testifying to the new value Humboldt placed on ethnic nationhood, he also thought that some of the special sensitivity to ambient beauty that he discerned in the Greeks was simply innate.Footnote ²⁴

Humboldt also touched on political circumstances as influences upon Greek character and culture, and in ways that would be seminal for the later development of his ideas of liberal politics and nationalism. Within the broad framework of dialectical historicism—as in that of civic humanism—the agonistic sense of confrontation and conflict inherent in the very notion of Bildung as an encounter among individuals began to play a role in the formation not just of individual but also of national characters. Strength, activity, and competitive spirit seemed just as necessary in the international as in the intersubjective arena. The political fragmentation of ancient Greece into numerous city-states thus became a prime factor in explaining the Greek cultural achievement, for the rivalries among the various polities spurred them on to greatness. This “jealousy … set the powers of each in more active motion.” Local jealousy, or “Eifersucht,” remained a key notion in Humboldt's thinking later on, with the Basque experience pivotal.Footnote ²⁵

Humboldt even demonstrated his awareness of perhaps the most fundamental way in which liberalism and nationalism could intersect when he showed how the fruitful tension and competition noted above establishes a mutually reinforcing amplification of strength in the individual and the nation, an amplification based on feelings of honor, pride, or self-worth. National “honor” and “national pride” entered the Humboldtian political equation in part to explain the productive rivalry among the city-states, but they also and more deeply helped ground individual self-worth, which in turn did the same for them. As Humboldt expressed this reciprocal relationship between the individual and the nation, “Because the worth of the nation rested upon the worth of its citizens, and because upon this depended their victories in war and their flourishing in peace, this national pride redoubled the attention devoted to the development of personal worth.”Footnote ²⁶

Yet for all that Humboldt seemed finally to have found sound reasons why Bildung and national spirit did more than just manage to coexist but actually flourished together in the soil of a republican constitution, there is still no reason to suggest that he thought this scheme could be transplanted to the modern world.Footnote ²⁷ Appreciation of the ancient Greeks, with their concentration on people rather than things and activity rather than results, was again meant in the spirit of inspiration, not imitation. The individual lack of energy and the strength of state institutions would still render a classical communitarian spirit dangerous to diversity in the modern context. With the turn to nationality as a fundamental category of thought in the essay on classical antiquity, Humboldt became much more comfortable explaining why the connection between the community and the individual was not destructive of Bildung in ancient Greece. The nation could in some sense serve as a mediator of individual Bildung. But while this dialectically historicist conception of nationhood helped to explain the miracle of ancient Athens, something would have to change before Humboldt could call for the reactivation of national spirit in the Europe of his day.

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Within two years of having outlined his educational program in the essay on classical antiquity, Humboldt began to find such exclusive emphasis on the Greeks too narrow. The study of humankind that led to Bildung needed to include as many national characters as possible in a cooperative effort at a “comparative anthropology.” While this scheme at first maintained the focus on high culture and on the culturally canonical nations seen in the essay on the Greeks, Humboldt later opened himself to the possibility that “primitive” peoples and the Herderian realm of folkways might also reveal much about national character and the human experience. Thus when he turned from theorizing this comparative anthropology and began to seek its empirical basis, he looked first to the rich cultural heritages of France and Spain, but before long redirected his attention to the Pyrenean mountains and valleys and the relatively smaller, more obscure nation of the Basques. There he also found the key to reconciling nationalism and liberalism. Humboldt saw in the Basques much that reminded him of the ancient Greek republics (not least in their political institutions), but in the end he saw even more, and was able to resolve certain tensions in his thinking about the Greeks, and about politics generally.Footnote ²⁸

Humboldt first visited Spain in 1798, departing his home in Directory Paris on a quest to gather materials for a planned history of the eighteenth century that would inaugurate the new comparative anthropology. Although still primarily concerned with the realm of high culture and social elites on this trip (and accompanied by his family), Humboldt's eye was already drawn to the Basque country and its inhabitants. When he returned to Spain on his own for a short expedition in 1801, it was therefore no surprise to find him devoting his scholarly efforts to the Basques.

Students of Humboldt have long noted the Basque travels as formative in his intellectual development, partly for the shift of attention to smaller nations, but even more because they marked the breakthrough to what would become his lasting intellectual vocation: the science of comparative linguistics.Footnote ²⁹ Humboldt began to place more emphasis upon an almost mystical core of national character, and upon language as both its clearest expression and its central force. Language at once provided the most direct and unmediated access to disparate national mentalities and did the most to shape them. Yet the increasing focus on language did not lead him to abandon his program to understand nationality in all its many facets, including the political; comparative linguistics did not subsume the comparative anthropology. However closely linked, nationality and language never became identical for Humboldt in the way the literature tends to assume.Footnote ³⁰

In a famous quote from his “Latium and Hellas” essay of 1806, Humboldt appeared close to such an equation when he relegated culture and politics—“the religion, the form of government, the customs and usages”—to a secondary status in “the life of a nation.” What these factors “gave and received, even through such lively reciprocity,” he observed, “can to an extent be taken away again.” But while language featured as the “soul of the nation,” and while Humboldt certainly concentrated on it in his future studies, the qualifier “to an extent” in the above statement must be underscored. In that very essay on Greek national character, after all, he organized his material around precisely those other factors.Footnote ³¹ And while most of his multivolume monograph on the Basques was concerned with their language, he still considered the travelogue with all its ethnographic and political details integral as well.Footnote ³² Language may have lain near the core of national character, but it was that “lively reciprocity” between national character and surrounding cultural and political conditions that proved decisive for Humboldt's analysis of the relationship between liberalism and nationalism, and for his newfound ability to bring together individual Bildung and classical republican national spirit without triggering the conformist nightmare of his earlier writings.

Humboldt's treatment of the relative fates of the French and Spanish Basques points up the importance of such more broadly ethnographic and political factors in the development of national character. Although both groups spoke the same language, and by Humboldt's definition therefore belonged to the same nationality, they still possessed different characters. Some of these differences arose from contacts with the surrounding Spanish and French, but even more Humboldt emphasized the two groups' distinct social, economic, and political situations. The French Basques were a much smaller, mostly pastoral people, whereas the Spanish Basques inhabited three separate provinces and had a quite prosperous mixture of smallholding agriculture and seafaring trade. And crucially, the Spanish Basques retained a degree of provincial autonomy and played “a significant role as a nation,” whereas the French Basques had “no political national bond among themselves.”Footnote ³³

Here, in explaining the relative success of the Spanish Basques, Humboldt sounded the keynote for his thinking about the relationship between the characters and circumstances of nations: the prime value of autonomy and self-assertion at both the individual and national levels. It was the Basque independence and love of liberty that accounted for their energy and strength of character as individuals and as a nation; and that energy and patriotic virtù underlay the nation's longevity and prosperity. Thus, as the purpose of Bildung was the formation of character, Humboldt found among the Basques the means by which strength of character could be reconciled and even mutually reinforced between the individual and national levels. In this way Humboldt could achieve a new Bildung-promoting balance between liberal politics and ancient republican communal spirit. For this autonomous strength was not innate to the Basques but rather depended upon their social and political environment. Without the liberal and patriotic institutions at work in Basque society, and particularly without the free-speaking autonomy of their provincial assemblies, Humboldt feared that the strong Basque character, and even the nation itself, might fade away.Footnote ³⁴

As factors that both required and promoted such individual independence, Humboldt adduced not just the Rousseauian noble simplicity of a rugged mountain folk, but also the industrious Basque agriculture and seaborne trade. He was particularly impressed by Basque landholding patterns, above all by the tendency of many Basque farmers to live isolated in their almost autarkic Caseríos, which in decidedly ancient republican fashion was at once the source of their patriotism, their love of liberty, and their strength of character. The province of Viscaya, with its popular assembly beneath the tree at Guernica, seemed to him in this way “a true republic [Freistaat] of landowners.”Footnote ³⁵ Humboldt's discussion of agriculture in the Basque provinces also showed how continued commitment to the individual autonomy of his early political philosophy allowed him to remain true as well to its focus on “the limits of state action” and on character rather than prosperity. Thus he argued that it would be premature for the Spanish government to force through agricultural reforms aiming at increased productivity on larger-scale holdings as long as the present human advantages to the character of the people remained so much greater than any likely material gains. Biscaya's “power, prestige, and even its very independence,” claimed Humboldt, “come only very indirectly from the productivity of the soil or the profits of commerce and industry, but rather only from the character, industriousness, and national zeal of its inhabitants.” Consequently, in cases where, as here, any dividends could only add nominally to national prosperity, but where the national character already demonstrated an admirable independence, rationalist economic planning had to yield at least until virtù and profit could be combined without disadvantage.Footnote ³⁶

Humboldt drew much the same liberal lesson of state self-restraint and individual self-reliance when he turned his attention from the economic to the political realm. Determining the proper policy for the Spanish monarchy to follow regarding its ethnically distinct Basque provinces had been one of the guiding questions singled out at the beginning of Die Vasken, and here, too, Humboldt maintained his liberal and pluralist sentiments concerning the role of the state while simultaneously recouping an ancient republican participatory virtù. He thought it best to leave the Basques more or less alone to develop according to their own proclivities. With reference to the relative autonomy of the provincial assemblies, Humboldt observed, “One cannot repeat it enough that the Spanish government could never win as much through the extension of its rights in Biscaya as it would lose through the decline of patriotic sentiment and national spirit which would be the unavoidable consequence of such a limitation of Biscayan freedoms.” It was, recall, precisely this freedom of national self-assertion that explained the different relative fates of French and Spanish Basques.Footnote ³⁷

In making clear with regard to provincial autonomy as to the provincial economy that Biscaya's greatest resource was the “strength of character of its inhabitants,” Humboldt showed that individual character and national character were reciprocally related in the same way he had observed in the case of the Greeks. Striving for one's own vigor and for that of the community went hand in hand for Humboldt and led to a sort of reciprocity between patriotism and Bildung. This process even laid the foundation for a vibrant civic culture, here crucially reliant upon voluntarist initiatives within civil society rather than upon the state as such, as seen in his repeated comments upon the contributions made by Basques who had gone out into the world to make their fortunes, only to return as patriotic benefactors later in life.Footnote ³⁸ Thus Humboldt was able to maintain the minimalist state and the concern for individual character of his early liberalism, but he did so now on the basis of civic participation and national spirit that he had so decried there. Through his encounter with the Basques, Humboldt had come to see that even in a modern monarchical state the proper institutional conditions could ensure that autonomous and diverse individual character would not be threatened by the presence of a strong national spirit. Indeed, he had concluded that the two types of Bildung, national and individual, were not just mutually supporting but mutually necessary, and that they buttressed not just moral fiber and identity but both “Volksaufklärung” and educated society as well.Footnote ³⁹

The notion of reciprocity also worked in another way to help Humboldt overcome his misgivings about the uniformity and weak character that might result from the modern application of ancient republican spirit. For if the fruitful tension between individual and national strength of character flourished in the context of free institutions, it also thrived on diversity. Not just at the level of individual diversity within a competitive civil society, but also at that of community rivalries, the process of character formation promoted both local diversity and national unity. It becomes clear in Humboldt's analysis that when national character and national spirit emerge spontaneously from the variegated realm of popular culture and civil society rather than from a centralized state, the uniformitarian threat to diversity fades considerably. As he observed, “Where the national spirit is a consequence of popular feeling, it limits itself first only to the district immediately surrounding the person.” Humboldt was even prepared to grant local authorities a role in promoting such civic bonds through popular festivities, as “in some ways parts of the constitution,” without fearing that this would engender laxity or homogeneity of character.Footnote ⁴⁰

While rivalries could be fought out in the political arena in a parliamentary system, it was above all in the sphere of culture—particularly popular culture—that Humboldt saw this other process of historically dialectical reciprocity at work. He was fascinated, for example, with the lexical diversity of Basque, even at geographically small scales. In more than one text, having remarked on the large number of synonyms in Basque, Humboldt noted the degree to which neighboring villages played out their local rivalries on the field of diction, with one hamlet choosing one word for, say, “finger,” while a nearby hamlet deliberately used another. Such local linguistic competitiveness led to a kind of local patriotism, or “national jealousy” of the sort seen among the Greek city-states. Since these local rivalries did not seem to stand in the way of a perceived common interest and identity, and since that latter kind of national spirit did not seem to inhibit the diversity of local character, Humboldt recorded this disputatious diction with as much approval as wonder.Footnote ⁴¹ Moreover, in his careful recording of Herderian ethnographic data relating to other aspects of folk culture, Humboldt found that locally varied songs, dances, games, and festivals also served as cultural markers and symbols of allegiance among the contentious villages, strengthening ties not just to the villages but to the nation as a whole.Footnote ⁴²

The Basque country was thus divided into numerous small regions on the basis of such jealously guarded customs, and these in turn merged into ever larger regions. Humboldt insisted on both the reciprocity and the dynamic, dialectical nature of this process. As he commented in a fundamental passage:

Lively local culture, brought to life through local and regional rivalries, strengthened popular moral fiber, energy, and Eigentümlichkeit. Such competitive local patriotism also proved central because it was in turn the vital first step leading to the tenacious Basque national patriotism, the feeling indispensable to the maintenance of their nation, language, and national personality over so many centuries. While local rivalry in ancient Greece had done as much to fragment the Greeks politically as it had to unite them culturally, among the Basques it promoted national identity and patriotic spirit at both levels. In this case, and in conjunction with their provincial autonomy, it even worked across nationality boundaries and stimulated Basque patriotism for the Spanish monarchy (given the later history of Basque-Spanish relations, a rather thought-provoking outcome to Humboldt's search for the best minority policy for the Spanish crown).

Thus from his travels and studies among the Basques, Humboldt came to the conclusion that the sort of autonomy and reciprocity at the individual, community, and national levels he had witnessed there would allow the successful fusion of national spirit, civic participation, and individual growth in the framework of a modern monarchical state, even a multinational one. Along with the changes in his view of nationality, in other words, the character of Humboldt's liberalism had also changed in these years. It remains to investigate now the effects of these alterations upon his ideas of German political life when he actively returned to that sphere after the Prussian humiliation by Napoleon in 1807.

* * *

If in the course of his encounter with the Basques Humboldt had drawn closer to a classical republican model for modern government, these years of rethinking also brought some changes in Humboldt's views of the Greek institutions themselves that made it easier to bridge the divide between antique and modern. Humboldt scholars usually emphasize the Olympian stability of his image of the Greeks, with even his much increased familiarity with the sources unable to shake the youthful Winckelmannian idealization of a Greece that never was. And Humboldt did cling pertinaciously to a vision of ancient Greece wherein an energetic but harmonious Bildung was achieved in the fusion of sensuality and intellect, nature and civilization. In terms of his analysis of Greek society and politics, however, two famous fragments of 1806 and 1807 offered some shifts of perspective that facilitated his embrace of a brand of communitarian participatory citizenship in the modern German context.

Two changes above all in Humboldt's analysis of the Greek polis served to diminish the perceived threat of uniformitarian domination of society by the political sphere. First, and surprisingly little noted in the literature, Humboldt revised his conception of the relationship between the civic order and civil society in ancient Greece. Instead of insisting on the all-consuming nature of the classical public realm as in his writings of the 1790s, the essays of 1806 and 1807 posited the existence of something analogous to a civil society among the Greeks. With the palaestra and academies in mind, Humboldt thought that to a unique degree “the Greeks besides their public and domestic life had still a third,” one that “was free from the bondage of the state and the law, and yet continually tied bonds of beautiful sociability around the largest part, and to be sure the most educated part, of the citizens.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This interlacing of social ties and free communal civic education still contrasted with the more individualist approach of the moderns, but it clearly left a larger social space for Humboldt's hoped-for equipoise between unity and diversity to emerge from the “greater and more beneficial friction” within society (at once dialectical and intersubjective) that led to individual Bildung.Footnote ⁴⁵ Humboldt seemed to see a freer communitarian spirit among the Greeks than previously, freer because (as among the Basques) it was one seated partly in social and cultural relationships rather than solely in political, state-based coercive institutions.

In the second of the two essays, written after the Prussian collapse at Jena, Humboldt introduced another critical shift in his views of the ancient Greeks, namely, the idea that in their constitutional relations the Greeks really were more individualistic than communitarian after all. If it seemed above that Humboldt was simply watering down the distinction between ancient and modern that he had adopted in the 1790s, it becomes clear from the second essay that what he was in fact doing was to emphasize once more the uniqueness of the Greeks among the ancients, in this case through their balancing of the poles of individual liberty and ancient republican communalism. Or to express it in Humboldt's terms, he now made more of the distinction between Athens and Rome. Rome now stood for everything about the classical republics that Humboldt had previously found worrisome, particularly the subordination of all aspects of life to the polity. The Greeks, on the other hand (read Athenians, not Spartans), were declared to have possessed “a nature too noble, tender, free, and humane to found in its own time a political constitution that by necessity restricted individuality.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As in the Limits, Humboldt believed that in face of the greater external and internal dangers confronted by ancient states, they could think of no other way to secure the polity than “to eradicate the man in the citizen.” Here, however, he thought primarily of Rome in this regard, enjoying the fruits of such a policy in its lasting power and suffering them in its lack of individual cultivation. The Athenians had not subsumed the man in the citizen and had therefore seen a blossoming of both cultural and political life that proved all too evanescent.Footnote ⁴⁷

If the above alterations in his image of the Greeks made it easier for Humboldt to adapt the classical republican model to a modern civil society and state, the most significant shift of perspective in this second encounter with the Greeks emerged from the fact that he could no longer so clearly praise the Greek way at the expense of the Roman. Humboldt's new appreciation of the value of nationality at least to some extent changed the way he approached the problem of liberal politics. In the Limits he had been primarily concerned to insure that the role of citizen not interfere with the development of the human being. Here, however, while the Greek was still “noble” and “free” in his attachment to individuality, and the Roman stunted in trying to “eradicate” the individual, Humboldt contended that “a lack of restraint that tears the beneficial ties of civic love [Bürgerliebe] would be more damaging than the most forceful oppression.” He went on to declaim, “No one therefore attempt to part the man from the citizen; only in the manner in which both are melded in the individual can there lie a difference, and herein the political constitution comes into question.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The problem of liberal constitutional theory had obviously been partly redefined for Humboldt, and the communitarian civic spirit of the classical republican tradition had received a new lease on life. With clear reference to the situation of Germany under Napoleonic domination, Humboldt espoused the primacy of national spirit and national independence, values he had recognized as indispensable to the maintenance of national character at least since his studies of the proudly independent Basques and now hoped to institutionalize in Germany. Humboldt sought a sort of middle ground between Greek and Roman in which to bring together the classical, nationalist, and liberal traditions in his political thought.

The stage was therefore set for Humboldt to adapt the ancient republican model of government to the needs of modern Germany, a task undertaken in the succeeding years of his involvement in the constitutional planning for the post-Napoleonic Prussian and German states. From 1813 to 1815, Humboldt was the most prolific and influential drafter of constitutions in the negotiations leading to the formation of the German Confederation, and in 1819 King Friedrich Wilhelm III appointed him the minister in charge of introducing constitutional reforms in Prussia (a project soon abandoned in the wake of the repressive Carlsbad Decrees and Humboldt's ouster from service). Humboldt's constitutional memos contain numerous parallels to the Basque texts and the later Greek essays that attest to the new basis for his political ideas. His very desire for a renewed German state owed much to his newfound appreciation of the Roman approach to government, as he saw the need for strong civic bonds and state institutions that could protect national security. More than just security, however, Humboldt also paid heed to the kind of national self-assertion and feelings of self-worth seen in the Basque case, where such strength reciprocally guaranteed not just external autonomy but also internal liberty, energy, and strength of character. As Humboldt expressed this complex relationship in the 1813 memo on the German constitution:

Humboldt offered recognition here not just of his newfound commitment to German nationalism and a national state, but also of the value of autonomy in general. As with the Basques of northern Spain, such political and cultural autonomy could join the individual and the nation, liberalism and nationalism, in a fruitful, mutually supportive relationship.Footnote ⁴⁹

Such an analysis of the role of autonomy showed itself not just in Humboldt's constitutional schemes, but also in his plans for Prussian educational reform during his tenure as minister in the years 1809–10, where dialectical free thought was to stimulate the growth of strong character, these then combining to bolster commitment to both the Prussian state and the German nation. These interrelationships emerged particularly clearly in his proposals for the new University of Berlin. Only the open-ended pursuit of knowledge or “Wissenschaft,” Humboldt proclaimed, “reshapes the character,” and both the state and humanity, he thought, were much more concerned with “character and action” than with “knowledge and talking.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Education, in other words, was still supposed to facilitate generalized Bildung and active self-formation, rather than directly prepare students to be good citizens, subjects, or state servants in a programmatic or content-focused way. Moreover, even if less consequently than in the Limits, Humboldt did what he could to preserve the independence of the educational system from government control. His discovery of nationalism did not therefore entail the caving in to the Prussian state that some scholars claim. Humboldt still wanted to prevent the state's assuming a tutelary function, above all in the inculcation of the sort of national spirit he had feared in the 1790s. He thus opposed any ideas of including a Fichtean “national education” in the Bildung reform package, just as he later used the same argument against the tutelary state to support his call for immediate Jewish emancipation (any improvement in Jewish character was to develop from the free exercise of full civil and political rights rather than from state direction). But he did so now not out of a rejection of the civic model or of nationalism generally, but because he believed such a nationalist spirit had to emerge from below, from within society, in order for the reciprocity of individual and national Bildung to take hold without uniformity, as in the Basque country.Footnote ⁵¹ Hence Humboldt tried to leave the universities as independent as possible (he was unable to secure the University of Berlin's independent financial endowment but left a fair measure of self-government, above all in educational content), and he built in a mixed structure of state and local citizen oversight for secondary schools.Footnote ⁵² The nature of Humboldt's liberalism had changed since 1792, but it had ceased to be anti-nationalist without ceasing to be liberal.

Again as in the Basque case, in order to stimulate the desired national and individual independent spirit, strong participatory institutions had to be established—above all provincial assemblies and local self-government. For independent spirit and strength to develop, individuals and society had to be granted independence. Functions formerly performed by the government had to be entrusted to the public. Such a move would actually promote civic spirit and support for the government, Humboldt thought, even as it bolstered the nation's “moral force” and institutionalized the kind of classical mixed constitution that deters tyranny. As Humboldt observed in a pregnant passage of the memo of 1813 on the German constitution, “Well-constructed estates are not only a necessary defense against governmental intrusion into private rights, but they also increase the feeling of independence in the nation and bind it more closely to the government.”Footnote ⁵³ Even at the level of local government and school financing, Humboldt expected to see benefits from such reciprocity between individual and civic spirit and activity. Entrusting local citizens with some responsibility for schools, for example, would both strengthen their characters and instill a certain local patriotism or “Bürgersinn.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Ultimately, education of the citizenry could not be fully entrusted to the central state, nor could it even be left entirely to schools. Individuals and citizens had to learn how to be individuals and citizens independently within society, through active practice within “institutions, which allocate to the activity of the individual a free scope [einen freien Spielraum], and give him opportunity for gathering experiences.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In these provisions for extensive local and provincial powers, Humboldt also drew on the second kind of reciprocity seen in the Basque studies, that arising from the contentious diversity of local social and cultural life. Local identities and rivalries insured diversity in the face of any pressures toward uniformity, even as they also almost paradoxically helped to undergird broader national identity and patriotic spirit. As Humboldt recognized, “The German is only aware that he is a German when he feels himself to be an inhabitant of a particular state in the common fatherland.” He tellingly combined this with the other kind of reciprocal strength (individual and civic) when he completed the thought, “… and his power and activity would be lamed if, with the sacrifice of his provincial autonomy, he were brought under the control of a foreign entity with no real claim upon him at all.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Humboldt thus called persistently for a federal or decentralized state, whether for Germany as a whole or for Prussia alone (the same process worked in either case). In part he thought this regionalist predilection simply a product of the German national character, but as with the fragmentation of the Greek city-states, he also expected that such multipolarity and its concomitant fractious friction would nourish German cultural diversity and greatness in the future as it had in the past. Here as elsewhere in his constitutional and educational schemes, he demonstrated his fundamental conviction that national character at once shapes and is shaped by political institutions. These notions of individual-collective reciprocity, and of the contentious chain leading from local to national identities, probably also explain Humboldt's otherwise puzzling call for corporate voting, where the “honor” of the individual and the corporation “reciprocally work more strongly upon one another,” thereby promoting “civic mindedness” and “morality” to a greater degree than would individual voting in a larger mass.Footnote ⁵⁷ Here as generally in Humboldt's thought after the Basque researches, when put in the framework of civic humanist participatory liberty, the tensions between national sentiment, the central state, local self-government, and individual rights and Bildung suddenly resolved themselves, and redounded to the strength of each.