He made a major contribution to the development of liberalism by envisioning education as a means of realizing individual possibility rather than a way of drilling traditional ideas into youth to suit them for an already established occupation or social role.

[13] Her first-born son Heinrich, Wilhelm and Alexander's half-brother, Rittmaster in the Gendarme regiment was something of a ne'er do well, not often mentioned in the family history.

The Prussian King asked him to leave Rome in 1809 and to lead the directorate of education under Friedrich Ferdinand Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten.

His wife did not return with him to Prussia; the couple met again when Humboldt stepped down from the educational post and was appointed head of the Embassy in Vienna.

[17] Humboldt installed a standardized system of public instruction, from basic schools till secondary education, and founded Berlin University.

He imposed a standardization of state examinations and inspections and created a special department within the ministry to oversee and design curricula, textbooks and learning aids.

[20][21] As a successful diplomat between 1802 and 1819, Humboldt was plenipotentiary Prussian minister at Rome from 1802, ambassador at Vienna from 1812 during the closing struggles of the Napoleonic Wars, at the congress of Prague (1813) where he was instrumental in drawing Austria to ally with Prussia and Russia against Napoleon; a signer of the peace treaty at Paris and the treaty between Prussia and defeated Saxony (1815), and at the congress at Aachen in 1818.

However, the increasingly reactionary policy of the Prussian government made him give up political life in 1819; and from that time forward he devoted himself solely to literature and study.

What Humboldt terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them.

[29] The reception of Humboldt's work remains problematic in English-speaking countries, despite the work of Langham Brown, Manchester and James W. Underhill (Humboldt, Worldview and Language, 2009), on account of his concept of what he called Weltansicht, the linguistic worldview, with Weltanschauung being translated simply as 'worldview', a term associated with ideologies and cultural mindsets in both German and English.

One notable exception is the work of Underhill, who explores comparative linguistic studies in both Creating Worldviews: Language, Ideology & Metaphor (2011) and in Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate & War (2012).

The Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project, in France, published online a 7-hour series of lectures on Humboldt's thought on language, with the Berlin specialist Professor Trabant.