A linkage of Alexander von Humboldt and monism is by and large absent from the history of science literature of the post--Second World War period. Yet the connection is real and of considerable significance for our understanding of the monist movement and its history. Monism took on different forms in different places, as this volume shows, and I am dealing predominantly, although not exclusively, with its German location. In the German-speaking world, the linkage of Humboldt with monism, in addition to expressing a scientific trend, was part of a political dynamic. As I have documented elsewhere, literature about Humboldt and his works began appearing at the time of the 1848 revolution when it was produced by the radicalized liberal Left on behalf of the politics of Freiheit und Einheit (freedom and national unification). These forty-eighters, as well as many of Humboldt's late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century biographers and interpreters, were by and large the same people who took part in the monist movement and its forerunner organizations, demonstrating the importance of political dissent for the rise of monism. The monists in part represented an outgrowth of the older tradition of German Humboldtianism from the period 1848 to 1871, especially with respect to their commitment to the popularization of science in public education. Already early during the second half of the nineteenth century, Humboldt was instrumentalized on behalf of institutions that propagated the monist worldview to various degrees, some of which included the name Humboldt or the title Kosmos in their banner.
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