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214 ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES

bourgeoisie ruled. Rather, it would be a balanced system, in which a
totally apolitical professional civil service and an equally apolitical pro-
fessional officer corps, recruited and promoted strictly by merit, would
be autonomous in their very narrow spheres. These people—today we
would call them technocrats—would have limited tasks and would be
under the strict supervision of an independent professional judiciary.
But within these limits they would be the masters. There would then be
two spheres of individual freedom for the bourgeoisie, a moral and cul-
tural one, and an economic one.
Humboldt had presented this concept earlier in book form.* After
the total defeat of the Prussian monarchy by Napoleon in 1806, the
collapse paralyzed all the forces that would otherwise have stopped
Humboldt—the king, the aristocracy, the military. He ran with the
opportunity and founded the University of Berlin as the main carrier
of his political concepts, with brilliant success. The University of
Berlin did indeed create the peculiar political structure the Germans
in the nineteenth century called the “Rechtsstaat” (the Lawful State),
in which an autonomous and self-governing elite of civil servants and
general staff officers was in full control of the political and military
sphere; an autonomous and self-governing elite of educated people
(“die Gebildeten Staende”) organized around self-governing univer-
sities provided a “liberal” cultural sphere; and in which there was an
autonomous and largely unrestricted economy. This structure first
gave Prussia the moral and cultural, and soon thereafter the political
and economic ascendancy in Germany. Both leadership in Europe
and admiration outside of it followed in short order, especially on the
part of the British and the Americans for whom the Germans, until
1890 or so, were the cultural and intellectual models. All this was
exactly what Humboldt in the hour of darkest defeat and total despair
had envisaged and aimed at. Indeed, he spelled out his aims clearly in
the prospectus and the charter of his university.
Perhaps because “Fustest with the Mostest” must aim at creating
something truly new, something truly different, nonexperts and outsiders
seem to do as well as the experts, in fact, often better. HoffmannLaRoche,
for instance, did not owe its strategy to chemists, but to a musician who
had married the granddaughter of the company’s foun

*Under the title The Limits on the Effectiveness of Government (Die Grenzen der
Wirksamkeit des Staates), one of the very few original books on political philosophy
ever written by a German.