Karl Gotthard Lamprecht

Background

Karl Lamprecht was born in Jessen in Saxony on February 25, 1856, the son of a liberal Lutheran pastor.

Education

He studied at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Munich, taking his doctorate at Munich in 1879. After a year of private tutoring, he qualified as lecturer at Bonn; he was promoted to assistant professor in 1885. In 1890 he accepted a full professorship at Marburg but removed the following year to Leipzig.

Career

Lamprecht's first major work, German Economic Life in the Middle Ages (3 vols. ), came out in 1886.

In 1891 appeared the first volume (of the eventual 21 volumes) of what was to be Lamprecht's lifework, the German History. Controversy broke out immediately, reaching its climax with volume 6 in 1897. History, he explained in later articles and books, has been a discipline that explores useless individual facts and concentrates too narrowly on politics. It should deal with the whole life of human society and, like the natural sciences, generalize and seek causal laws that will provide a few basic principles that will enable one to explain the whole human past.

Lamprecht thought that he had discovered such general principles in the sociopsychological realm. Once one has discovered the thought and behavior patterns of a people for a given period, one has the key by which to explain the whole society, its economic and social life, its art and thought, and its politics. Art, he thought, was particularly revealing about such thought and behavior patterns. Furthermore, such patterns of thinking and acting never completely disappear but live on into the next age, so that, as new ones come along, they tend to accumulate, leading to a progressive complexity and intensity of social life.

These theories of history hit the historical profession at a very sensitive time, when nature, methods, and purposes of history were being painfully examined. Men such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber were seeking to give history a rationale distinct from, but equally as reputable as, that of natural science. Others were seeking ways to treat history in all its aspects, even to find a universal history. What was lacking was a way to deal with these things within a single discipline. They were being treated as separate subjects, often collaboratively, and without any integrating principle. To this extent, Lamprecht found a sympathetic hearing. But his own solution—the "psychogenetic"—met with universal rejection as being too vague and not amenable to rigorous, disciplined study. The literature of controversy grew enormously after 1900, but the controversy quickly became tiresome, even for those engaged in it. Lamprecht's influence, therefore, was slight, not to say negative, but he was a symptom and child of his age.

In 1909 he founded, with private funds, the Institute for Cultural and Universal History at Leipzig in order to train scholars to carry on his work. It produced many admirers but few followers.

Achievements

• Lamprecht found a positive reception for his ideas and methods in France and the United States. In 1904, he was invited to give a series of lectures at Columbia University, which were translated and published in 1905 as What is History?
  
  Lamprecht's work was a formative influence in the thinking of the French social historian Marc Bloch as well the Annales School. One of his students was Cai Yuanpei, who later served as the chancellor of Beijing University and had an enormous influence on modern Chinese thought.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Etudes sur l'état économique de la France pendant la première partie du Moyen âge (French Edition)

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• According to Ernst Breisach,
  
  Lamprecht himself stipulated psychological forces as the basic forces in all of history. But they derived from the collective psyche of every nation and not from the idiosyncratic forces of individual psyches. Historiography p. 279