The machine of the culture: pedagogy and politics between Wilhelm von Humboldt and Nietzsche

Abstract

The relationship between the appeals of culture and the political interference of the State within Education was one of the most important issues of intellectual debate that had place in Germany from the end of the 18th. Century to the 1871 unification. The path described by this period, that has Wilhelm von Humboldt and Nietzsche as its two extremes, constitutes, at further reading, the very course of liberalism within the German Educational System in the 19th. Century. By recollecting the conceptual elements deployed in this debate we can not only rescue the issues that allowed the German model to reach the success it had in Europe then as a pedagogical model, but also understand how Humboldt’s and Nietzsche’s philosophies could be seen as efforts to get into the discussion.