Hello and we are going to

today I'm very pleased to be joined by Harry

Hello thank you for having me on and we are going to talk about

Wilhelm von Humboldt's Limits of State Action

it's not going to be a book review but we are going to talk about the main

insights from Humboldt. I think he is a very important figure and he contains a really interesting

insights that people in the libertarian and classical liberal camp absolutely love.

He was a very interesting figure.

Have you heard of him?

Only what you've told me so far in the lead up to this discussion. You told me that he was pivotal in establishing the universities of Prussia? Was that correct?

Or am I misremembering what you said? There were universities before him, but he was really pivotal in shaping the education system of Prussia and Germany. I think that the Berlin University is named also a university of Humboldt University after him.

He was a major figure in all sorts of fields.

He was privately educated. He became a genius and he was educated by lots of important figures of the

Enlightenment period in Berlin. So he was born basically in 1767

and he died in 1835 in Hegel near Berlin.

He was born in Potsdam.

He was 24 years old when he wrote the limits of state action,

and I think he wrote it in 1792, so it's just three years after the French Revolution began.

He's a very interesting figure.

I imagine that lots of political tracts were written around that time

discussing the excesses of the French Revolution. Because the French Revolution.

Because the French Revolution, as I recall it, was essentially a lot of these

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