Much acclaimed, often misjudged and misinterpreted, Wilhelm von Humboldt was one of the most original and influential thinkers in eighteenth-century German intellectual history. His contemporaries knew him as a sophisticated Prussian diplomat serving in several ambassadorial posts, as a reform-minded Prussian undersecretary of the interior, and as a tough negotiator and right hand of Karl August Hardenberg, chancellor of Prussia during the reorganization of Europe in the post-Napoleonic days. At his death only a few knew that he had also been intensely involved in linguistic studies, the field in which his most important mark in history would be made. His mind was so far-ranging, his intellect so penetrating, his interests so varied and esoteric that it is beyond any one person's competence to interpret his life's work. As a consequence it became his fate to be interpreted by many, each of whom viewed him from a different area...