Alexander von Humboldt and monism

Nicolaas Rupke

pp. 71-90

in: Todd H. Weir (ed), Monism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

A linkage of "Alexander von Humboldt" and "monism" is by and large absent from the history of science literature of the post-Second World War period. Yet the connection is real and of considerable significance for our understanding of the monist movement and its history. Monism took on different forms in different places, as this volume shows, and I am dealing predominantly, although not exclusively, with its German location. In the German-speaking world, the linkage of Humboldt with monism, in addition to expressing a scientific trend, was part of a political dynamic. As I have documented elsewhere,¹ literature about Humboldt and his works began appearing at the time of the 1848 revolution when it was produced by the radicalized liberal Left on behalf of the politics of "Freiheit und Einheit" (freedom and national unification). These forty-eighters, as well as many of Humboldt's late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century biographers and interpreters, were by and large the same people who took part in the monist movement and its forerunner organizations, demonstrating the importance of political dissent for the rise of monism.²

Cited authors

von Humboldt Alexander