The Best of the OLL No. 47: Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Of the Individual Man” (1792)

This is part of “The Best of the Online Library of Liberty” which is a collection of some of the most important material in the OLL. A thematic list with links to HTML versions of the texts is available [here](/pages/best-of-the-oll). Humboldt’s book *The Limits of State Action* is one of the best works defending individual liberty and the limited state ever written and also one of the first book-length surveys of classical liberal political theory. Only a few extracts appeared in journals during his life. The entire work was not published until after his death.