— 390 knows perfectly well not only the value of labor, cooperation and self-government. Along with the individualistic understanding of the work of each individual, processing objects of nature, in accordance with his needs, motivations, according to his strength and his right!), he expresses something else, which was paid little attention to, directly in the assessments of this writer. Humboldt puts forward, for example, the following position: that the owner, in the true sense of the word, is not the one who enjoys the familiar object, but who creates this object with his own labor 2). Based on this, proving the complete inconsistency of police guardianship on the part of the state, the author expresses a view similar to Thomas Pan that the positive activity of the state seems unnecessary in those cases where public initiative is possible.
V. Humboldt envisions the formation of communities in states that will replace the state itself in the positive work and take upon themselves, to a certain extent, even security measures. The state is left with court and war. If the state has not yet been eliminated, as the anarchists wish it, then in any case Humboldt, with his treatise, sufficiently lowered the importance of the state, reducing its role only to negative activity (the functions of external and internal security) and declaring the evil of intervention and the stagnation of power for the individual.
Anarchists seem to agree with Humboldt in praising the state as evil. An alternative arose before them to declare the state a centuries-old error, as the French doctrinaires did with absolutism.
1) See Leep... IP. t pe.
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Puzsky and Anglo-American revolutions, or recognize the state as a historical category, the necessity of which, due to the possible social transformation, is easy to deny for the future. In the latter case, the state is, indeed, only a transitory species of further social forms. And no matter how far the author was from such a substantiation of his views, it is impossible not to admit that his views themselves revealed a tendency towards the greatest possible elimination of state influence on the life of the individual, making free communities preferable for it as the immediate and positively acting environment. On them Humboldt himself shifts a huge part of the previous state functions and, moreover, in expressions that involuntarily force one to remember certain ideas anarchism'). For example, V. Humboldt designed communal unions, proving their full possibility, with a certain degree of enlightenment, and their appropriateness. Voluntarily contracted between well-meaning people for their mutual safety (for example, for the implementation of any dangerous branch of production), these self-initiated and amateur communities can replace with their activity (in the above mentioned and many other cases) the activity of the state.
In this way, so to speak, you will gradually self-destruct the indicated state functions, V. Humboldt, even to see the true goal of the state °).
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The thought expressed here in forms reflecting the enlightened era is distinguished by its specificity and, perhaps, narrowness, but it does not serve as its foundation: optimistic confidence in the beneficial effects of freedom, self-indulgence, self-indulgence, benevolence of the individual, a voluntary agreement with other individuals, which is supposed to be. much stronger, and much more consistent with that harsh, lifelong discipline, that predilection for sanctions and patterns that distinguished the ethic and theocratic norms of understanding, and the conditions of time and justice, i.e., the impact on the individual of the environment, about which twenty years Montesquieu collected information in history and countries all over the world?