Karl Gottfried Lamprecht

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Karl Gottfried Lamprecht (February 25, 1856 Jessen, Saxony - May 10, 1915 Leipzig) was a German historian. As a student, he trained in history, political science, economics, and art at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Münich. Lamprecht taught at the university in Marburg and later at Leipzig, where he founded a center dedicated to comparative world and cultural history (Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte).

Lamprecht studied German and European social and economic history, particularly of the Middle Ages. He aroused considerable controversy with his interdisciplinary methods and focus on broad social, environmental and even psychological questions in history. Lamprecht's ambitious Deutsche Geschichte on the whole trajectory of German history sparked a famous Methodenstreit (methodological dispute) within Germany's academic history establishment. Lamprecht came under criticism from more traditionally-minded scholars like Friedrich Meinecke and Georg von Below for his lack of methodological rigor, and inattention to important political trends and ideologies. As a result, Lamprecht and his students were marginalized by the German academy and interdisciplinary social history remained something of a taboo among German historians for much of the twentieth century.

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

Lamprecht found a much more 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 failed to convince other historians, but a mutant of the idea of a Volksseele intruded into French historiography as the concept of a period's mentality, especially as mentalité or sensibilité in Febvre's work. Breisach p.342-3

Lamprecht's work was a formative influence in the thinking of the French social historian Marc Bloch as well.

Select works by Karl Lamprecht

Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 3 vols., Leipzig 1885-1886 (Aalen 1969)
Deutsche Geschichte, 12 vols. + 2 incomplete vols., Berlin 1891-1909
Die kulturhistorische Methode, Berlin 1900
What is History: Five lectures on the modern science of history, New York 1905

Bibliography

Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856-1915), Atlantic Highlands (NJ) 1993.
Gerald Diesener, Lamprecht, Karl. German cultural and social historian, in: Kelly Boyd (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Vol. I, London/Chicago 1999, pp. 680-681.
Georg G. Iggers, The Historian Banished. Karl Lamprecht in Imperial Germany, in: Central European History 27 (1994), pp. 87-92.

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