Karl Lamprecht and Intimations of Interdisciplinarity
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 25 February 2024 is the 168th anniversary of the birth of Karl Gotthard Lamprecht (25 February 1856 – 10 May 1915), who was born in Jessen in Saxony on this date in 1856.
Before the Carr-Elton debate, and before the Lowith-Blumenberg debate, there was the Methodenstreit, a controversy over historiographical method, also called historikerstreit. “Methodenstreit” is also used to reference a controversy over method in economics (loosely related to this historical Methodenstreit), and Historikerstreit is also used to reference a controversy among German historians in the 1980s, so the most specific way to refer to the controversy at hand is as the Lamprechetstrieit.
Lamprecht was on the losing side of the controversy that bears his name. Since Lamprecht took on the establishment of German historiography, his failure to convert the establishment isn’t a surprise. For us today it is difficult to appreciate the conflict and its motivations. What Lamprecht was suggesting seems pretty tame to us—social and cultural history, with a bit of interdisciplinarity into the bargain. Social and economic history has become so familiar to us that we don’t think of it as being in any sense controversial. It would not be inaccurate to say that we live in after the triumph of social history, which is now arguably more central to history than state-based histories of elite activity. I touched on this in my episode on Christopher Hill and Marxist history, as Marxist historians have been especially interested in social history and economic history. We could make a distinction between social history that skews toward economic history, and which tends to be Marxist, and social history that skews toward cultural history, and which is not necessarily Marxist. Lamprecht belongs in the latter camp. At one point Lamprecht received a favorable review from Franz Mehring, who said that his work fit well with historical materialism. After that, Lamprecht was suspected of Marxism.
Georg G. Iggers’ The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present argues that Lamprecht stood outside this German conception of history, which conception he attributes primarily to Wilhelm von Humboldt (brother of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt) and Leopold von Ranke. Iggers goes on to identify three fundamental ideas that define the German conception of history:
1. The state as an end in itself, also called the primacy of foreign policy;
2. The rejection of thinking in normative terms in history, also called anti-normativity;
3. The rejection of conceptualized thinking, also called anti-comprehensivity.
These ideas are all still familiar to us today. In contemporary terms they are:
1. Elite history focusing on states and state power;
2. The rejection of moralizing history;
3. The rejection of agendas in history, which agendas Geoffrey Elton called thesis-driven history, with the alternative being thesis-free history.
Perhaps Lamprecht’s most significant difference from the German conception of history is his rejection of state-based history in favor of social and cultural history. We can understand the dominance of state-based history as an exercise in social cohesion in the wake of the unification of Germany from the North German Confederation Treaty of 1866 to the November Constitution of 1871. A new and, in some ways, inchoate nation-state needs all the help it can get to pull together; Lamprecht’s colleagues could be understood as contributing to nation-building by furnishing the young German nation-state with a nation history.
On the other hand, there could be a social or cultural history that also contributed to state cohesion, and there are aspects of Lamprecht’s history that could be construed in this way. For example, Lamprecht’s developed Herder’s conception of a “Folk soul” (Volksseele). Of the folk soul Asa Tilton wrote in a review of Lamprecht:
“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.”
Nietzsche was rather less sympathetic and called it the “damned folk soul,” but it influenced Lucien Febvre and the Annales school in France, eventually becoming transformed into the idea of mentalities, in turn further developed by many in the Annales school.
Despite being on the losing end of a quarrel, Lamprecht was not without influence, as we can see from his influence on the Annales school, and his long correspondence with Belgian historian Henri Pirenne. He even eventually became rector at the University of Leipzig, and his multi-volume history of Germany was one of the best selling works of history in his time. It isn’t difficult to understand the appeal of his cultural history to a popular audience, and how social history eventually triumphed. Everyone who has disliked their history lessons in school, being subjected to the dreary triumvirate of names, dates, and places, knows the dissatisfaction with elite state-based history. In this sense, Lamprecht was the thin end of the wedge that would ultimately lead to the dissolution of what Iggers called the German conception of history.
This is also the least theoretically interesting part of Lamprecht’s history. The more interesting part is Lamprecht’s response to historicism and to Ranke in particular. Iggers argues for a close relationship between the German conception of history and historicism. As we know, everyone has their own meaning of historicism, so we shouldn’t use the term without first supplying a definition. The kind of historicism associated with Ranke is a function of the second two of Iggers’ three properties of the German conception of history: anti-normativity, or the rejection of moralizing history, and anti-comprehensivity, or thesis-free history.
This is in some ways a reductive account of Ranke’s historicism, which cannot be do neatly adumbrated. Ranke viewed each era of history almost as an isolated and independent whole, and each isolated and independent whole should be judged on its own terms, and its history should be recounted on its own terms. The antithesis of this, to give a familiar example, is Edward Gibbon’s Enlightenment history of ancient Rome. Gibbon is continuously interjecting the presuppositions of the Enlightenment into his account of Roman history, so that the Romans find themselves judged, and their history told, not according to their own standards, but according to the standards of an English gentleman of the eighteenth century. Ranke, then, is the anti-Enlightenment historian.
The slogan that was lifted from Ranke was “wie es eigentlich gewesen,” usually translated as, “the way it really was” or “how it really was,” which seems like a banal phrase, and many have observed that this is an unlikely slogan to serve as fighting words, but, among historians at least, it became something like that. Lamprecht suggested that that task of this historian is not strictly descriptive, but should be analytic, even seeking causes and laws, so that “wie es eigentlich gewesen” should be replaced by “wie es eigentlich geworden,” which could be rendered as “ how things became the way they are,” or “to show how it came to be so.” Lamprecht was effectively arguing that culture and society created the conditions for political institutions and not the other way around. In other words, Lamprecht was among the first to argue that politics is downstream from culture.
Lamprecht focused increasingly on the psychology and social psychology of history in his later work. In his What is History? (German original 1904; English translation 1905) he wrote:
“The full historical comprehension of a single change or of a single phenomenon, with their historical significance, can only be acquired from the most general principles, that is to say, from the application of the highest universal-historical categories. These, however, are all summed up in the one great truth, that the general historical moment, the meaning of the unity of history, is not to be looked for so much in the apparently important historical events in these occurrences, whose transmission through time and space is checked by the difficulty of unknown ways and unprepared forms, but in the liquid, as it were, ethereal elements which are destined to influence universal history through long periods of time. These are the products of the higher intellectual activity, moral and religious principles, art, poetry, and science; these are the influences which become the chief constituents in the great stream of world history.”
In this passage we find hints both of a nomothetic conception of history, and the longue durée of the Annales school.
The current scholarly consensus is that Lamprecht’s critics were right, and that he was careless and sloppy in his history; he tried to do too much, covering too many fields, and this ruined his reputation among other historians, but this did not prevent him from writing popular works, nor from being seen by the public as one of the great historians of the day.
We have seen this many times in history. An imperfect attempt at an impossible task inspires admiration in some and contempt in others. Could it be done better today? Yes, probably. Probably also it could be done even better in the future, when we have a more robust conceptual framework for history, which can serve as a better guide to an historian trying to integrate a less familiar period of history, or a less familiar variety of history, into a synthesis that exceeds the remit of any specialist and the knowledge of any individual. But both the impetus to interdisciplinarity and the defense of disciplinary siloes have their representatives, and these representatives will continue to ply their trades. No one can master the whole that is history, but some try. Lamprecht was among those who tried.
Video Presentations
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/karl-lamprecht-and-intimations-of:5
https://rumble.com/v4flc7o-karl-lamprecht-and-intimations-of-interdisciplinarity.html
Podcast
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a31b8276-53cd-4723-b6ad-a39c8faa4572/episodes/f03b76e0-5eea-4f0d-8f7f-d7380408fdb4/today-in-philosophy-of-history-karl-lamprecht-and-intimations-of-interdisciplinarity