ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is generally credited with raising the various notions of cultivation to the status of a coherent academic ideal as well as being an important early formulator of German historicism. Humboldt believed that organic connections among individualities could not be captured by the purely objective approach of natural sciences, but rather required a special historical method. The relationship between the reformed university's newly emancipated sciences and the ideal of cultivation was no less problematic in practice. The promotion of state authority had never been wholly absent from the cultivation ideal. There was a measure of ambiguity in Humboldt himself, and the widespread reception of an idealist blend derived from Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the second half of nineteenth century, notably with the emergence of Bismarck, fostered the prominence of statist prophets on academic pulpits, of whom the greatest was the Prussian historian, Heinrich von Treitschke.
