This earlier study (1932) on a German thinker little known in France is high quality: well-informed, well-thought and clearly written, it deals with the thought of Humboldt until 1794 (and thus leaves aside his work that is philologqiues posterior). Note the "francization" of the first name (for Guillaume Wilheim) characteristic of the interwar period. After a very full biography for the period, comes the study of Humboldt political theses, anxious to limit the role of the state, theorist of "liberalism" against what was later called a welfare state that stifles , mixing all the individual freedoms.