Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 to 1835) was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government official and diplomat, and the founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which later took his name together with that of his younger brother, the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. He contributed to the philosophy of language, ethnolinguistics and the theory and practice of education, and he helped shape liberalism by seeing education as a way of realizing individual possibility. His treatise The Limits of State Action, written in the early 1790s, was not published in full until 1852.