 His notion of the rise of human self-consciousness is therefore quite the opposite of Hobbes’ and particularly Hegel’s view as depicted by the latter in the life and death struggle of the master/slave dialectics in his Phenomenology of the Spirit. For Humboldt it is language instead that serves as the civilizing force leading the individual to self-consciousness and societal interaction and thus involves a positive relation to the other. In his later linguistic writings, discussed below, he developed a communicative model of human speech that can be seen as an extension and transformation of the Fichtean concept of the intersubjective “I”. In the twentieth century the philosopher Jürgen Habermas attempted to incorporate Humboldt’s model in his theory of communicative action. 