 His political writings from this period take issue with the eighteenth century absolutist idea of the state while at the same time offering a critical analysis of the political situation in contemporary France. Humboldt tried to explain the unsuccessful attempts by the French National Assembly to create a lasting constitution and civic order by its unrealistic absolutist reliance on principles of abstract reason. As early as 1791 he predicted the fate of the new French constitution when he argued that “constitutions cannot be grafted upon human beings as sprigs on a tree.” Where time and nature had not prepared the ground, he argued “it would be like tying blossoms on trees with pieces of twine: the first sunlight at noon will scorch them to death” (GS Vol 1: 80). In order to safeguard the freedom of the individual from government encroachment, Humboldt proposed to limit the functions and the authority of the state. This included the state’s endeavors to provide actively for the welfare of its citizens whenever this would cripple or hinder the free development of the individual’s own potential for self-realization. For the “true end of man”, Humboldt wrote, was “the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole”. To reach that goal, freedom was the indispensable condition (GS Vol 1: 107). Yet the free development of the individuals, their self-realization, or Bildung, their “self-culture”, as the American Transcendentalists would translate the term, for Humboldt necessarily implied a social and political dimension. Self-culture demanded “a manifold of situations” (eine Mannigfaltigkeit der Situationen) for the individual citizens, so that they would be able to enter freely into relationships of association and cooperation with one another, because, Humboldt argued, humans can realize their potential as individuals only in society. For this reason, Humboldt maintained, a government should not be evaluated solely by its legal system that granted freedom and liberty to its citizens but equally by how much and to what degree it helped assure the creation of such a manifold of situations and opportunities for the individual citizens to develop their human capacities in actual reality.