capitalism

Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1767–1835) 229
religious belief and devotion. But Erasmus, perhaps the
greatest of these Renaissance humanists, was embarrassed
to be reminded by Luther, during their Dialogue on
Freewill and Predestination, of the most appalling doctrine,
divine predestination—that God predetermines all of
us human beings to conduct our lives in the different ways
for which He intends either to reward or to punish us eternally—would
appear to have been very clearly taught by
St. Paul himself in his Epistle to the Romans. In the same
Dialogue, Luther also forestalled what has come to be
called the Freewill Defense. He wrote,
Now by “necessarily” I do not mean compulsorily ...
when a man is without the Spirit of God he does not do evil
against his will, as if he were taken by the scruff of his
neck and forced to do it ...but he does it of his own
accord and with a ready will.
In the 20th century, the label humanist was appropriated
by people who rejected all religious belief and insisted that
they were concerned only with human welfare in this
world. By the middle of that century, it had become widely
agreed that theism—what the philosopher Hume, rather
than the mathematical physicist Laplace, was the first to
describe as the religious hypothesis—could not either be
proved to be true or proved to be false by reference to any
facts of this world.
All such humanists are still atheists. But most now construe
the letter “a” in the word atheist as having the same
negative but unaggressive meaning as the “a”s in such
words as atypical and asymmetrical. By at least the beginning
of the 21st century, many of the countries of Europe
and North America had become so completely secularized
in their culture as to leave little room for specifically
humanist organizations. Indeed, well before the end of the
20th century, the main secular humanist organization in the
United States gave birth to a Committee for the Scientific
Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)
while its publishing arm had, well before September 11,
2001, produced more than one substantial scholarly work
critical not of Christianity, but of Islam.
See also Enlightenment; Religion and Liberty; Republicanism,
Classical; Whiggism
Further Readings
Flew, Antony. Atheistic Humanism. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus
Books, 1993.
Gaskin, J. C. A., ed. Varieties of Unbelief: From Epicurus to Sartre.
New York and London: Macmillan, 1989.
Kurtz, Paul, and Timothy J. Madigan, eds. Challenges to the
Enlightenment: In Defense of Reason and Science. Buffalo, NY:
Prometheus Books, 1994.
AF
HUMBOLDT, WILHELM VON
(1767–1835)
Wilhelm von Humboldt was a German political theorist and
a statesman. It is difficult to say when classical liberalism
as a political philosophy fully emerged. In England, one
usually thinks of John Locke and his Two Treatises on
Government (1690) as the starting point of this philosophy
of limited government. In Germany, the question cannot be
answered as easily, although there is one major candidate
for honors as its major early advocate: von Humboldt,
whose famous treatise was titled The Limits of State Action.
At the least, it is difficult to find another work of such outstanding
relevance and quality within the German liberal
tradition.
By the mid-18th century, liberal ideas had already made
some advance within the various German principalities, but
the French Revolution inspired the first wave of strict liberalism
in the political world of the Old Empire. Thinkers
such as Kant began to speak out for the rights of man, but
there also were some conservatives and moderate liberals
who expressed fears about the violent turn the French revolutionary
movement would take. It was during this period
that von Humboldt’s political mind was shaped.
Born in Potsdam, near Berlin, von Humboldt was born
into the Prussian lower aristocracy. Brought up with his
brother, the explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt,
von Humboldt began studying law and classical literature at
Göttingen University in 1788. When the French Revolution
broke out a year later, he undertook a journey to Paris on
the invitation of the political essayist and statesman the
Comte de Mirabeau to watch the “funeral ceremony of
French despotism.” He came back slightly disillusioned. As
a result, in his Thoughts on Constitutions (1791), von
Humboldt did not hesitate to declare his sympathy with
the liberal ideals of the Revolution, but doubted whether
these ideals could be maintained throughout its course. A
more gradualist approach, he argued, would have been less
dangerous.
The Limits of State Action outlined his political ideas
most fully. Although today it is regarded as his masterpiece,
von Humboldt felt uneasy about it, perhaps for fear of censorship.
Only a few sections of the book were published during
his lifetime, but it became an instant classic of political
philosophy when it was published posthumously in 1851.
Von Humboldt’s intellectual interests went far beyond
that of political philosophy. A universally educated man, he
wrote extensively about such diverse subjects as linguistics,
natural history, and education. However, it was practical
politics, rather than theory, that soon became the focus of
his life. Prussia’s defeats at the hands of Napoleon forced
long-needed reforms within the Prussian state. A peculiar
brand of liberalism came into existence that was typical of