Getting down to basics: What's the rightful role of government in our lives?
A primer on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “The Sphere and Duties of Government”
Editor’s note from Seth Jordan:
We so often bicker about politics, but we almost never ask the most fundamental questions — what’s the purpose of government? What should it do, and what shouldn’t it do? To answer such questions, we must build up our understanding on first principles, otherwise our ideas remain scattershot. As the 20th century social reformer Rudolf Steiner said “The social capacity that we need [depends on] our capacity to delve back into fundamental, primary matters and not hang our social insight upon secondary or tertiary things, which are only an after-effect.”1
This is what Wilhelm von Humboldt attempted in his The Sphere and Duties of Government. Chief amongst Humboldt’s principles was that the purpose of our life isn’t to be found in satisfying our desires, but in fully developing ourselves. Government is a social form we’ve created to protect our rights, but it should never stifle such development — it shouldn’t stop us from cultivating and giving our gifts.
Humboldt’s book was highly admired by Steiner, who spoke about it thus:
There is among German literature a work which deeply penetrates the question of the relationship between the overall power of the state and the freedom of the individual… I know of no other work in world literature which penetrates so deeply into this question. It is entitled The Sphere and Duties of Government and… [it] defends most beautifully the human personality in its full, free unfolding, against every aspect of state omnipotence.2
Written as it was in the late 1700’s, The Sphere and Duties of Government can be incredibly challenging to read, which is why the following primer by Gopi Krishna is so vitally important (below you’ll find the first part of the primer, followed by a PDF of the whole thing). Through his careful and methodical retelling, Gopi brings the most essential points to our attention so we can meditate on them and come to our own understanding.
Some readers may find Humboldt’s work one-sided — for instance, he doesn’t address the sphere and duties of the economy, which of course also plays a major role in whether people can develop themselves fully — but that shouldn’t take away from the magnitude of his accomplishment. We don’t need to agree with all his observations, but to wrestle with his ideas so they can stimulate greater clarity in our own ideas, whatever our social and political leanings might be. And it is such thoughtful, grounded clarity which is the tonic that our political chaos most needs right now.
A primer on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “The Sphere and Duties of Government”
By Gopi Krishna
What is a government, actually? What are its precise limits? On what basis are those limits to be prescribed, and for what precise reasons?
These were some of the core questions that the Prussian-German Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) sought to answer in his The Sphere and Duties of Government, and in doing so created a view of the government that is as clear cut as any mathematical theorem. This work had such an impact on the influential John Stuart Mill that he began his book, On Liberty, with a quote by Humboldt:
Humboldt also had a tremendous influence on Friedrich Schiller and had many interactions with Goethe. But in spite of this, the work is not really well known today as much as one would expect. In the light of the emotional charge that surrounds the issue of the government nowadays, and all the talk of “limited government,” “libertarianism,” and “welfare,” and especially the experience of the world during 2020-2023 with regard to governmental restrictions, it appears to me that it is time to take another look at this work. Perhaps it will help elucidate the right course of action in the midst of the political conundrums facing us today.
I will be going through this work chapter-by-chapter, summarizing and commenting on each one of the 16 chapters.
CHAPTER I: Introduction
Humboldt begins by noting that there is far more attention given to the process of how someone gets into government and how the government subsequently functions, than to the critical question of what the limits of government should be. Hence it is no wonder that the fascination is with the candidates, their allegiances, their campaigns, and their victories. But the fireworks end once they are in government and then only a few observe their subsequent voting process, and almost no one wonders which issues should be voted on and what the limits of the government should even be, in spite of the fact that those limits do determine how much our day-to-day life is affected by the government. The power of a government may be legitimate, as is the case with protecting the people from acts of war or policing a neighborhood, or illegitimate in the case of oppressive governments, but the power itself garners far more interest than the question: what is the power based on? He hence points out that the actual exercise of power, or occurrence of political revolutions often involving the “drawn sword,” turn out to be far more fascinating and exciting than the slow and systematic development towards a system that values human freedom. This is where he provides one of his many moving metaphors:
The tiny seed, for example, which drops into the awaiting soil, unseen and unheeded, brings forth a far richer and more genial blessing in its growth and germination than the violent eruption of a volcano, which, however necessary, is always attended with destruction…
In order to create such an organic growth of a form of governance, he then turns his attention to what is usually seen as the purpose of a modern government. Modern governments tend to focus on man’s happiness, comfort, prosperity, productiveness — his welfare, in short. This is as true in 2023 as it was true in 1823 — for example, the phrase “pursuit of happiness” is an entrenched aspect of the American Constitution. This pursuit is in stark contrast to older states that tended to focus on virtue instead of happiness, and as a result had far more oppressive forms of control. And yet, because the basic focus was on the virtue of the individual member of the state, it also offered a far more energetic setting for challenging the individual man. We can look at Sparta for an example of this, where the entire state focused its energies on developing the ultimate warrior, which led to quite horrific practices. Yet, we still remember the echoes of Spartan heroism. Humboldt mentions that unlike the situation in such ancient states, individuals today seem to suffer from diminished energy and the old ideals appear as mere abstractions as the average human being seeks to reach virtue through happiness instead of the other way around.
He wishes to solve this problem for the modern condition, and it is at this point in the book that he zeroes in on the fundamental question: What is the state, or government, for? — Is it just for the purpose of security, or should the moral and physical well being of the nation also be part of its domain?
CHAPTER II: Of the Individual Man, and the Highest Ends of His Existence
Here Humboldt tackles what should be the fundamental basis for deciding on the form of any government — the free and harmonious development of the individual human being. And it is not merely individual freedom, but an accompanying richness in the variety of situations that allows for the various faculties to be developed. Otherwise, a free person in a monotonous and rigid situation cannot exercise his freedom nor develop further. Under “situation” he also includes relationships with other members of society, who will have characters very distinct from the individual in question. Hence by establishing deep and intimate ties with other members of society, one creates more possibilities for developing the latent and unexplored aspects of oneself. He gives two examples — the relation between man and woman and the relation between the old and the young. He says there is something hidden in these connections and relations that can contribute something essential to the free flowering of the individual.
Hence, with the free and variegated development of the human individual, each person can come closer to nature as well. He notes eloquently that:
… it is true, in the highest sense, that each still perceives the beauty and rich abundance of the outer world, in the exact measure in which he is conscious of their existence in his own soul. How much sweeter and closer must this correspondence become between … internal feeling and outward perception — when man is not only passively open to external sensations and impressions, but is himself also an agent!
In successive stages, Humboldt builds a picture of human development that can occur in the same way as a blossom becomes a fruit, or a new branch bursts forth from the stem — as a grand series of metamorphoses (he references Goethe’s On the Metamorphosis of Plants) — and that even reaches beyond the plant world in that one can cultivate oneself through one’s own initiative. And this development suffers when the rich variety of natural circumstances are no longer as they were in an older age — as the forests are leveled and the world becomes more and more homogenized. We experience this in our own day as the differences in architecture and culture across the major cities tend towards a uniform type. Hence Humboldt declares that it is all the more important to cherish the individuality in harmony with a variety of social and natural relationships — and this is the foundation for even beginning to think of the role of government.
We can see that right here, at the get go, Humboldt takes a very different route from that of libertarians like von Mises, Hayek, and Ayn Rand. The libertarians pick up only one side of the coin — the individual — and pay little attention to the harmony of society. As a result, practical self-interest takes the place of self-development and self-education of the individual, and the gospel of selfishness is proclaimed as a result. Hence, even though libertarians refer to Humboldt often, and he is even included under the libertarian tag at Wikipedia, he goes in a totally different and much more wholesome direction — as the rose bedecks herself, she bedecks the garden.
CHAPTER III: On the Solicitude of the State for the Positive Welfare of the Citizen
We now come to one of the critical chapters of his whole work, where he picks up the question of the government again, having established the primacy and centrality of the development of the individual in the previous chapter. He addresses the next logical question — is the function of the government to enable human development by warding off the trespasses into human freedom, or, in addition, to promote the positive welfare of the citizenry? And he is very clear what he includes under this umbrella of “positive welfare”:
Providing for the subsistence of people
Poor-laws i.e. removing poverty
Encouraging agriculture, industry, and commerce
Regulations of imports and exports, finance and currency, for the welfare of the citizens
Prevention or mitigation of natural disasters
And then he throws in this sentence like a stroke of lightning:
Now all such institutions, I maintain, are positively hurtful in their consequences, and wholly irreconcilable with a true system of polity…
We have to pause a bit for that one to sink in, because these are all the functions that we are so used to expecting from the government. It reminds us of a statement by Ronald Reagan: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” (It is another matter that, after saying this, he went on to outline how the government would help the farmers). For Humboldt, even the prevention of natural disasters by governmental means is said to be “positively hurtful in its consequences”! But he then goes on to explain why his conclusion is actually a logical consequence of certain realities of human nature.
In the first place, the vigorous development of a person requires a variety of conditions, but the state by its very nature tends towards uniformity, constraining and sapping the individuals of their vitality for varied creative action. This uniformity tends to make machines of humans, and we are all quite familiar with the Kafkaesque “bureaucratic machine” that has manifested in all the governmental institutions.
In the second place, this uniformity robs people of their initiative, where the actual care and concern for their fellow neighbor is now outsourced to this entity and it is now “their problem.” In doing that, it becomes a situation of shooting oneself in the foot, since a community devoid of a feeling of community becomes even more devoid of moral fiber and as a result generates even further social troubles that in turn require even more government intervention. Or put another way, when the governmental institution takes on the task of their positive welfare, instead of leaving it to the people’s spontaneous self organization, it ends up drying up that living force of sympathy between people and leads to cold indifference. It leads from “Love thy neighbor” to “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
In the third place, one of the healthy elements of a relation to one’s work in society is that of loving one’s work, which provides it the best kind of work ethic that there is. With the example of farmers, Humboldt describes how their life weaves together with the realities of sowing and reaping that gives them that characteristic love of the soil and has its effect on all of us. But if the occupation itself becomes a means to an end, and the work is not nurtured for its own sake, a pernicious effect spreads through society because of it. The great lethargy and actual corruption in many governmental departments around the world stand as testament to that fact within the government, and Humboldt notes that this effect spreads further into society as well.
He also picks up another quintessential example of human association, marriage, and between man and woman — to show the mutual sensitivity that is required to create a harmonious union. And then he provides another gem:
WOMAN is, strictly speaking, nearer to the ideal of human nature than man; and whilst it is true that she more rarely reaches it, it may only be that it is more difficult to ascend by the steep, immediate path, than to approach slowly by the winding one… History would afford sufficient confirmation of the truth we would establish, and exhibit unmistakably the close and invariable connection that exists between national morality and respect for the female sex.
In the light of this, Humboldt recommends that the government withdraw itself entirely from dealing with the institution of matrimony. It is instructive to see what happens when the state does set up definitions directly dealing with the matrimonial bond — the legal idea of matrimony has now become a raw and emotionally-charged battleground as people jostle about the definitions of “male,” “female,” and “marriage.”
Fourth, individual cases always suffer under a uniform order of the government. Fifth, the development of individuality is harmed. Just as, intellectually, truth is objective, morals can also be developed with the same objectivity through mutual cooperation of individuals, a development that stalls when any force is incorporated into it as it has to be in case of a government.
Now, if such a governmental institution is still established, then what happens? Well, it has a tendency to bloat — as the institution swells, personal liberty consequently diminishes. In other words, a parasitic tendency gets revealed due to the overreach of governance into the moral-human sphere. By removing the option of spontaneous activity, all the resulting processes — struggles, overcoming obstacles, joy in accomplishments, and subsequent satisfaction — get short-circuited. Hence there is now the pursuit of happiness without the possibility of joy – an impossible situation. And this situation gets multiplied in society, and it loses innumerable hands which can provide mutual aid and support to individual development.
At this junction, we can mention how the entry of sports in modern life seems to provide an avenue for precisely the same type of process that gets short-circuited under governmental interventions — the whole process of individual improvement and achievement. In the case of sports however, the thing achieved floats apart from the real, practical processes in the world — kicking a ball or running a mile does not by itself create an extra shoe, grow an extra tomato, or generate a new breakthrough in knowledge, though it still may stimulate this indirectly as people get inspired by the idea of achievement. This hollowness of direct achievement was why sports were even actively encouraged by many totalitarian governments during the 19th-20th centuries. The need for spontaneous activity could be safely discharged on the playing grounds, instead of being bottled up and then exploding in a way that destabilizes part of the government’s own structure.
In all, at the end of this chapter, Humboldt concludes that the domain of the government cannot enter any region where free individual initiative, free contracts and associations must provide the lifeblood of the activity, and must restrict itself only for the purpose of protecting the security of individuals. Since the state cannot but use the same means that it uses for protecting security — namely, force — in other domains as well, it has to be restricted to just that one domain. The other domains are now the responsibility of the people, or as he calls it — the “national institution.” And so he leaves us with another zinger towards the end:
Between a national and a governmental institution there is always a vast and important difference.
This is not something we are used to thinking about. When I say India, China, US, or Germany, I doubt whether the nation aspect and the state aspect of these names distinguish themselves in your mind — instead, there is generally one notion of the nation-state that includes people within that geographical boundary. But Humboldt, by securing a different foundation of free initiative for the nation, distinguishes it very clearly from the government or state that has to incorporate compulsion into its structure.
CHAPTER IV: On the Solicitude of the State for the Negative Welfare of the Citizen – His Security
In this short chapter, Humboldt shows how personal security is the only thing that the individual cannot obtain for himself. When his rights are overridden through any kind of force, then he is usually not in a position to redress that by himself, and even if he did, society as a whole will always have these recurring instances of rights-violations to the degree that those tendencies are still part of human nature. If he took personal revenge, that would evoke a chain reaction of vengeance, so the only way to stop this cascade is for the establishment of a state or government, whose exact job is to put a stop to this through compulsion. Through punishment to the violating party, the government is supposed to redress the balance of rights, and thus secure a domain of free activity once more for the individual.
A similar situation occurs in the case of an attack of war, in which case once again the state apparatus has to be activated. As a historical note, he says that in older forms of monarchical governance the kings were always those who were leaders in wars or resolvers of disputes during peacetime. Their domain was solely that of rights violations, foreign or domestic, and no free nation ever dreamt of handing over to the king any authority other than this. If a king sought dominion directly instead of allowing citizens their own free development, Humboldt says such a king is inwardly more attached to slavery, whether he knows it or not!
Read the full essay:
Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 2/16/1919 (from Conscious Society, p. 21)
Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 1/13/1916 (from The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol I, lecture 18)
Hi, great article! I have started a telegram group - Steiner & Anthroposophy - where Rudolf Steiner's writings and lectures are discussed, please feel free to join if it sounds like something you might be interested in. https://t.me/steineranthroposophy
Thank you for posting this. Having read only the first part, I have already seen much of what has happened through the latest years through a new (though old) lens.
It is a bit difficult for me, living in a country with so-called social laws, that these take away some possibilities for the individual initiative.
Good to be shaken!