The Limits of State Action

The Limits of State Action is a philosophical treatise by the Prussian scholar and statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, a major work of the German Enlightenment. Though written in the early 1790s, it was not published in its entirety until 1852, long after von Humboldt's death in 1835. The work was a significant source for the ideas John Stuart Mill popularized in his 1859 book On Liberty, which draws a brief quotation from it as its epigraph and discusses it favorably in its chapter on individuality; Mill worked from an 1854 English translation titled The Sphere and Duties of Government. In it, Humboldt sets out the criteria by which the permissible limits of the state's activities may be determined.