ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I want to recover parts of Humboldt’s founding act that differ from the accepted founding myth and the well-established Humboldt orthodoxy.1 In particular, I want to offer a reading of Humboldt as the creator of a kind of “anti-organization organization” designed to stave off the inevitable petrifying effects that must result from an effort to organize something as ephemeral as scientific creativity. To surface this strand of Humboldt’s thinking, it is necessary to establish several key planks of his work in the years preceding his leadership of the university reform. In the founding myth, Humboldt is the fountainhead of the system of education that became the Prussian-German educational machinery. The founding myth not only wrongly equates what the German university became under leaders like Friedrich Althoff with the very different institution Humboldt wanted it to become; it also prevents us from fully seeing how radical and original Humboldt’s design was. Humboldt was not only the advocate of the university’s radical institutional autonomy, which never materialized in Germany, but also the originator of an anti-utilitarian institutional design that succeeds precisely because it picks up where Smith left off. In fact, Humboldt’s genius can best be appreciated in contrast to Adam Smith. For Smith, the overriding sentiment vis-à-vis the professors was one of distrust. His chief design instruments-competition, choice, and tuition-dependence-were meant to check and discourage professorial opportunism.
