Karl Gotthard Lamprecht

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

7 min readFeb 26, 2023

Today is the 167th anniversary of the birth of Karl Gotthard Lamprecht (25 February 1856–10 May 1915), who was born on this date in 1856.

Karl Joachim Weintraub, in his Visions of Culture: Voltaire, Guizot, Burckhardt, Lamprecht, Huizinga, Ortega Y Gasset, gives an interesting sketch of Lamprecht that suggests the complexity of the man:

“…a reading of Lamprecht, several years before the conception of this book, had drawn my attention to this controversial figure. He more and more seemed a fruitful contrast both to Burckhardt and to Huizinga. He was an arch-systematizer, an ardent ‘methodologist’ and historical ‘scientist,’ and a vociferous advocate of cultural history, though more successful among the reading public than among his fellow historians. He aroused great hostility against his person as well as against the overly ambitious claims he made in defense of cultural history; he fought tenaciously; he rarely acknowledged his mistakes even when they were forced upon his attention. Many of his fundamental assumptions now seem wrong; but it is exactly from his errors that one can learn. Perhaps no other historian — except Spengler, to whom he was in many ways similar — can illustrate so well as Lamprecht the size of the tasks and problems facing the historian of civilization. His work points to the vicious dangers inherent in this branch of historical scholarship, but also to its potential rewards and to tasks which should not be shunned. Many strains of the rich historiographic developments of the nineteenth century met in this man.”

Robert Edwin Herzstein in The Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages: Universal State or German Catastrophe? wrote the following of Lamprecht:

“He is one of the most significant figures in the development of the writing of cultural history. Lamprecht was influenced by the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and sought to apply the analysis of the development of social and psychical forces to the study of history.”

In the Lamprecht essay included in this collection, “German Emperors and German Culture under the Franconians,” we find Lamprecht musing on the possibility of a universal medieval empire, such as the Holy Roman Empire aspired to be:

“A truly universal mediaeval empire could only have been brought into being with a Roman and Italian, not a German, base. This fact was grasped by the Emperors who followed Henry VI and by the Popes who came after Gregory VII. An empire ruled from Germany could only be a Central European state, a Roman Empire of the German Nation, resting upon Germany, Burgundy and northern Italy. When all is said and done it was only this type of empire that was truly in the national interests of Germany: in the great days of mediaeval Germany, the eleventh century, it was established by Henry II, Conrad II, and Henry III.”

As implied by Herzstein in noting the influence of Wundt on Lamprecht, Lamprecht became known for integrating psychology into his historical works, primarily in Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter and Deutsche Geschichte. In the generations following Lamprecht later historians would attempt to integrate psychoanalytic psychiatry and sociology into history — a development especially associated with Bruce Mazlish. Lamprecht also became known for Kulturgeschichte, which is sometimes translated into English as “culture history” and sometimes as “history of civilization” — based on on Weintraub’s profile of Lamprecht as an historian of civilization, the latter might well be appropriate. If we think of the intuitive difference between “historian of culture” and “historian of civilization” as these terms are typically used in English, the difference is significant. This work was highly controversial in its time, as was Lamprecht’s conception of scientific history.

Lamprecht delivered a lecture at the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis in 1904, and a further four lectures at Columbia University. These five talks were collected in What is History?: Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, published in German in 1904 and translated into English in 1905. In a review of this work, Asa Tilton describes what we might call a genealogy of historical psychologism, throwing in Herder and Burckhardt for good measure:

“Herder introduced the concept of the ‘folk soul,’ and a new interpretation of history arose — the descriptive history of civilization. This disappeared with the ending of the first period of subjectivism. When subjectivism began to dominate again, about I870, psychology, economics, ethnology, etc. had established themselves, and with their help, and as a part of the same movement, a new and more penetrating social-psychic interpretation of history appeared, i. e., culture-history. Burckhardt began the analysis of psychic conditions by dividing the Middle Ages from modern times, a division generally recognized by the individualistic school, although, with that inconsistency which constitutes its chief charm for many minds, it generally denies the possibility of a systematic extension of the method. Lamprecht is the first who has worked out logically and applied systematically the principles of the social-psychic method.”

The reference to Herder isn’t really as off-base as I have implied above (though connecting Burckhardt to psychological history strikes me as too much of a stretch). Lamprecht discusses Herder in his paper Herder und Kant als Theoretiker der Geschichtswissenschaft (“Herder and Kant as Theoreticians of Historical Science”). After asserting that a line of world-historical development is drawn by the passage from lower to higher cultural ages, Lamprecht then writes:

“For Kant, who admittedly did not give the concrete historical development in his rather voluminous writings that belong here, this line would on the whole have been a line of progress from less developed to more and more highly characterized bourgeois constitutions: so here it would be more or less development intertwined with internally continuous moments. With Herder, on the other hand, although a continuous moment in the general progress from power and wisdom to goodness is also expressed here, the general view is different. According to Herder, every nation is an independent ‘form’ of historical development, it is therefore based on a national ‘idea’; and the result of the event can only be that this form fills itself more and more with divine powers until what is peculiar to it is produced in the highest perfection. Hence each nation has developed one side of events to the point of absolute perfection; this perfection cannot be surpassed. Thus, for example, the ideals of art for humanity lie once and for all with the Greeks, the ideals of law with the Romans, etc. But world history orders the effect of these ideals of the human in its various aspects, as does natural history in the effect of the ideals given with the types of the time of creation.”

Lamprecht mentions Herder several times in his What is History?: Five Lectures on the Modern Science of History, and in the following passage he connects Herder to a particular “line of development”:

“When communities have made rapid progress toward a higher spiritual existence, it is not in a rational manner or with purely intellectual age-marks of the thought process. Rather with youthful feelings of anticipation, with an ecstatic presentiment of dimly felt combinations, are the portals of a new epoch entered. Science becomes a prophecy, philosophy turns to poetical metaphysics. That was the character of the great German period of subjectivity that began with Klopstock, and ended in the spreading branches of the philosophy of identity — the period to which Herder, as one of its first great phenomena, belongs.”

Here is a paragraph from the same work in which Lamprecht justifies what he calls his “socio-psychic” method:

“Historical science therefore plays a double part: (1) as the basis of the practical as of the theoretical mental sciences, and (2) as stimulus to a historical method within the range of psychology. It is a position which is quite normally conditioned by the fact that psychic movements pass, as regards time, far more rapidly than physical movements, and that the change appears to us qualitatively different on that account. If in their relations the psychic developments of a given time had corresponded to the physical, only one mechanism would be needed to dominate them both; for they would have shown a hundred thousand and more years ago the same character as they show in the traditional records of to-day. Now it is well known that where the conception of life is in question, that this is not the case; for example, in animal and plant organisms. In human life, i.e. in history, a moment of much quicker change of phenomena intervenes. How is it to be controlled? It can only happen in that psychology as a psychological mechanism is allied with a functional idea of the time and becomes at once variable. And this functional idea historical science must supply. Through this it grows to be an evolutionistic psychology fully suited to the actual course of things and as such the basis of mental sciences, both theoretical and applied.”

On this basis it could be argued that Lamprecht prefigured the concern with mentalities on the part of the Annales school historians, but, clearly, those who followed him with more elaborate psychological and sociological interpretations of history are his true heirs.

Further Resources

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Karl Lamprecht - Wikipedia