Uses of Cultural History: Karl Lamprecht in Argentina

Uses of Cultural History:
Karl Lamprecht in Argentina
LEWIS PYENSON
SLEMCO, Board of Regents Professor in Liberal Arts and
Research Professor of History, Center for Louisiana Studies,
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
F
OR YOUNG PEOPLE starting out in history of science during
the late 1960s who were interested in how ideas have related to
social environment, the appearance of Fritz Ringer’s Decline of
the German Mandarins was an event. They, and I among them, avidly
plumbed the book for evidence that could help describe the university
environment that hosted the early-twentieth-century revolution in
physics during the reign of Wilhelm II. Ringer focused on academics—
the mandarins, an aristocracy of talent defined by analogy with the
administrative, judicial, and military elite of China—who wrote about
the nature of knowledge and the aim of both the natural sciences and
the humanities.
One passage in Ringer’s book has attracted my attention for nearly
thirty years. It is the conclusion of Ringer’s chapter about the origins of
the cultural crisis in which academics began to question whether specialist activity in the model of the natural sciences was appropriate for
humanists. In three pages Ringer deals with a figure who has remained
outside the canon of German writers cited by twentieth-century commentators, Karl Lamprecht.
Lamprecht, Ringer writes, was at the center of a controversy that
became known as the Methodenstreit, the struggle over method. In the
1890s, Lamprecht, ordinarius of history at Leipzig, was publishing a
multivolume history of Germany that had a wide readership. Borrowing
eclectically from political historians, economic historians, and psychologists, Lamprecht enlisted a “rather turbulent mixture of anthropological
information, imaginative portraiture, and embarrassingly superfluous
rhetoric about psychosocial laws” to describe cultural epochs in terms
of fundamental psychological resonances. Lamprecht’s writings generated intensely negative feelings in the German historical community, for whom the aim of history remained the elaboration of decisive
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individual action in the development of the state. There was, however,
no general agreement about Lamprecht’s basic orientation, whether he
was, indeed, idealist, materialist, or positivist. The Lamprecht controversy, Ringer concludes, “helped make German historians acutely conscious about their methods during the late 1890s and thereafter.” 1
Ringer’s evaluation almost suggests that Karl Lamprecht was the
progenitor of cultural history, as the field is practiced today. As a unifying theorist, Lamprecht would seem to be the historian’s Lavoisier, Liebig, and Maxwell all rolled into one. It was with some surprise, then,
that a dedicated social historian of science in the early 1970s found
little discussion, if any at all, about Lamprecht’s work and his institute
at Leipzig. During the middle third of the twentieth century, when history made room for collective biography, cliometrics, and hermeneutics, our cicerones were Namier, Bloch, Braudel, Momigliano, Fogel,
and Foucault. Artistic production was a key element of Lamprecht’s
approach to history (he collected tens of thousands of children’s drawings from around the world in an attempt to formulate a law for aesthetics corresponding to Ernst Haeckel’s biogenetic law, “ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny”), but his absence is notable over the past generation, when art historians have been questioning the foundations of
their field.2 One senses that Lamprecht has been read out of history.
If Lamprecht is largely ignored today, he was at the center of things
a century ago. Lamprecht explicitly challenged the reigning historical
paradigm, formulated by Leopold von Ranke and justified by writers
such as Wilhelm Dilthey, that the state was the principal historical
explanandum. For Lamprecht, the explanation related to the choices of
individual historical actors. The controversy resulted in Lamprecht’s
ostracization from the society of German historians, who judged him
an incompetent interpreter of historical documents, a plagiarist of secondary works, and a subverter of the moral lessons to be won from the
past. The judgment in Germany was uncompromising. As a result, cultural history went into eclipse over the twenty years following Lamprecht’s death in 1915.3
1 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community,
1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969): 302–04. Ringer has recently reconsidered Lamprecht.
Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences
(Cambridge, Mass., 1997): 22 –24. Ringer calls Lamprecht’s approach “a reductive
psychophysical naturalism” (23).
2 Compare Kathryn Brush, “The Cultural Historian Karl Lamprecht: Practitioner and
Progenitor of Art History,” Central European History 26 (1993): 139–64, for a generally
favorable assessment.
3 Lamprecht referred to his theoretical orientation as kulturhistorisch, the method of the
history of civilizations, although it has been translated consistently as the method of cultural
history.
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237
Lamprecht’s story, recounted in a persuasive biography by Roger
Chickering, helps clarify the passage in Fritz Ringer’s Mandarins.4
Lamprecht emerges as a litmus test for German academia. Medieval
specialists were glad to demolish Lamprecht’s shaky structures. More
charitable colleagues who were sympathetic to widening history beyond
generals and councillors of state held their tongue as long as they
could, although even Lamprecht’s old supporter Ernst Bernheim could
not overlook obvious contradictions and systematic errors in Lamprecht’s work. Lamprecht’s most notable foreign supporter, Henri
Pirenne, finally broke with his German colleague over the First World
War, when Lamprecht acted as an apologist for the invasion and occupation of Belgium. It is noteworthy that the controversy-prone sociological phenomenon Max Weber treated Lamprecht as beneath contempt.
Lamprecht made common cause with specialists beyond Clio’s university domain—art historian Jacob Burckhardt may be named in addition to
economic historian Gustav Schmoller and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt.
His influence extended more widely than was usual among academics.
His works sold well over a hundred thousand copies, and his advice was
sought by municipal, state, and imperial authorities. But his firmest supporters lived beyond Europe. Although Lamprecht’s first American review
appeared only in 1898, he toured America in 1904, picking up an honorary doctorate from Columbia University and addressing an international
congress in St. Louis, Missouri, which had been organized by Harvard
University’s social theorist Hugo Münsterberg. There, Lamprecht’s program to extend history beyond politics and the state to embrace social
psychology resonated with the notions of American historians like Woodrow Wilson, Charles A. Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Frederick
Jackson Turner. Robinson had solicited a publication from Lamprecht
in 1900, and he arranged for Lamprecht’s American lectures to appear
in English in 1905. In the first decade of the century, Lamprecht received
accolades from J. Franklin Jameson, director of the Department of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution of Washington—one of the
world’s most liberally funded historical offices. Lamprecht’s writings on
historical geography found a sympathetic listener in Jameson, who was
engaged in publishing documents relating to the geography of American
history. Jameson arranged for Lamprecht to be named an honorary
member of the American Historical Association, and for Lamprecht’s
institute in Leipzig to receive Carnegie money for Amerikastudien.5
4 Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Highlands,
N.J., 1993).
5 Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship:A Study in the
Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, 1965): 152 –53, 209; Luise Schorn-Schütte, Karl Lamprecht:
Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Göttingen, 1984): 287 –309.
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A generation ago, while attempting to dissuade his colleagues from
undertaking a study of French mathematics and German chemistry,
Felix Gilbert emphasized the wide reputation that Lamprecht enjoyed
abroad.6 The Anglo-German historian of science and philosophy John
Theodore Merz was among Lamprecht’s contemporary admirers.
Merz, who wrote unabashedly and persuasively about French mathematics and German chemistry, held Lamprecht to be one of the great
historical thinkers of the nineteenth century, comparable to Ranke and
Dilthey. Lamprecht’s genius, Merz believed, was to pioneer a new kind
of history:
A great change has come over the writing of history in the course of
the nineteenth century. History, even if it be only political history, no
longer consists solely of a record of wars, battles, invasions, and revolutions, nor in the biography of kings, rulers, warriors, and statesmen. An account of the manners and customs of different peoples in
different ages is not relegated to isolated chapters, or to the meagre
appendix of a political history. The idea, which was already expressed
by older historians, that the progress of culture and civilisation, that
laws, art, science, and industry and the life of the people form by far
the most interesting side of history, has been realised in some of the
later historical works which the nineteenth century has produced. We
have now, at least, the beginnings of a history of the popular masses,
of their occupations, habits, and interests.7
Merz emphasized that Lamprecht (like Ranke) set down his theoretical
principles only after he had done a great deal of historical spadework.
Lamprecht considered Ranke’s guiding principles to be idealism and
“the universalistic conception of history after the manner of the cosmopolitan character of the classical literature of Germany.”8 For Merz,
idealism had fallen to realism, and cosmopolitanism to nationalism.
Merz believed that Lamprecht, the realist and nationalist, was the
exemplar of the age, an assessment that Lamprecht would have found
pleasing.
Lamprecht’s students and admirers extended from Merz and
Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge John Bagnall Bury
to William S. Learned and Carl Becker in the United States, to Gabriel
Monod in France, to Henri Pirenne and George Sarton in Belgium, and
6 Gilbert, “European and American Historiography,” in John Higham, ed., History
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965): 315 –87; the dissuasion appears in the second sentence on
315; 342 for Lamprecht.
7 Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Part II: Philosophical
Thought (1904–12; New York, 1965), 3: 31–32.
8 Ibid. 4:573–74.
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to Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov in Russia.9 These formidible scholars were concerned less with whether Lamprecht was correct in his
details than with whether his grand vision—and the resources he was
able to bring to it—could provide support for their own enterprises
that went beyond recounting politics and wars as events motivated by
extraordinary individuals. Following Lamprecht, they sought to capture the typical rather than the unusual in times past. However they
told their stories—whether as a transcendental meditation upon
inspired truths or as a painstaking analysis of tax records, trade figures, diplomatic traffic, or farming patterns—they sought to recapture
a Zeitgeist, or spirit of the times.
The Methodenstreit surrounding Lamprecht has been dignified as a
paradigm shift in historical practice, in the manner of Thomas Kuhn’s
understanding of scientific revolutions.10 In this view, there is a mutual
misunderstanding between believers in an old set of values and proponents of a new set. Less often observed is the extent to which a Kuhnian perspective frees specialist discourse from contamination with
broader social concerns; Kuhn’s account of Copernicanism makes no
reference to wars, systems of government or banking, or European
expansion. In Kuhn’s view, scientific revolutions occur in the writings
of a community of competent experts—within a discipline; they do not
perturb the discipline’s institutional configuration. The physics discipline continued without grave institutional dislocations, for example,
across the quantum and relativity revolutions, which occurred at the
time of Lamprecht’s great struggle.11
Whatever the judgment about Lamprecht’s scholarship—and there
is no doubt that he was rash and careless in his pronouncements—
Lamprecht the historian emerged as an iconic figure, much in the manner of Albert Einstein. The icons were substantially different—Einstein’s
lasted while Lamprecht’s evaporated, and Lamprecht gloried in his
image as a bourgeois German while Einstein took pride in his status as
a pacifist ex-German. But both Lamprecht and Einstein published
9 Schorn-Schütte, Lamprecht, 309–28; on Sarton and Lamprecht, Lewis Pyenson,
“Prerogatives of European Intellect: Historians of Science and the Promotion of Western
Civilization,” History of Science 31 (1993): 289–315, on 293–94.
10 Schorn-Schütte, Lamprecht, 14, 287; Peter Griss, Das Gedankenbild Karl Lamprechts:
Historisches Verhalten im Modernisierungsprozess der ‘Belle Epoque’ (Berne, 1987): 164.
11 Kuhn’s approach remained grounded in the neo-idealism of Alexandre Koyré. Kuhn,
The Trouble with the Historical Philosophy of Science: Robert and Maurine Rothschild
Distinguished Lecture, 19 November 1991 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). See John L. Heilbron,
“Thomas Samuel Kuhn (18 July 1922 –17 June 1996),” Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society 142 (1998): 678–86, for a balanced obituary; Jensine Andresen,
“Crisis and Kuhn,” Isis 90 (1999): S43–S67, for an examination of Kuhn’s early years.
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widely and quickly; neither man paid much attention to proofs. Both
Lamprecht and Einstein pulled in substantial salaries, and each was
lionized in popular circles.
Distance compromises the detail of an icon. Its structure and its
blemishes are dissolved in a field of color and form. In a corresponding
way, prophets (like those of Buddhism, Christianity, homeopathy, and
psychoanalysis) are sometimes received most fervently far from their
home, where the language of their prophecy is only the province of an
educated elite. The historical discipline is not immune from this law of
magnified misappropriation. One need simply reflect on the way that
Michel Foucault’s writings were absorbed by a generation of American
historical writers—uneasy in their grasp of academic French—who
apologized for Foucault’s obscure irony while paying little attention to
his source material.
While Lamprecht is an object of historical inquiry, we read the
Lamprecht epigoni (and none more attentively than Merz) with pleasure, while the painstaking criticisms of Lamprecht’s detractors have
been superseded by new studies and new kinds of evidence. This outcome relates only in part to the epigoni’s commanding intellectual
authority. We take pleasure in the company of their probing intellect;
their personality expressed in words shows us the meaning of times
past. There is a triumphalist cast to their lives, referenced in their
tenure at major institutions. Furthermore, knowing the large inertia of
convention and believing in the doctrine of progress, we are interested
in significant changes in vision and outlook: Reformers and revolutionaries hold our attention more than defenders of the status quo. Fundamentally, the epigoni write well. And finally, focusing back on
Lamprecht, we find instruction in the errors of leading historical figures, for as it is sometimes said, Einstein’s mistakes are more enlightening than most people’s accurate calculations.
Rüdiger vom Bruch has emphasized how Lamprecht promoted his
view of history as a form of cultural imperialism in China, Asia Minor,
and Latin America.12 In one of these settings Lamprecht became a
touchstone for recasting the discipline of history. The opportunity
occurred in the intellectual renascence of Latin America’s exemplary,
early-twentieth-century scientific institution, the National University of
La Plata in Argentina. As La Plata was hiring leading European
researchers in natural sciences and anthropology, the administration
sought to breathe relevance into the history of the nation, on the verge
12 Rüdiger vom Bruch, “Kulturimperialismus und Kulturwissenschaften,” Berichte zur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte 13 (1990): 83–92, on 87.
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of celebrating the centennial of its independence from Spain. The promoter of a Lamprechtian vision in Argentina was Ernesto Quesada.
*
*
*
Ernesto Quesada, born to privilege and power in Buenos Aires in
1858, accompanied his father, Vicente G. Quesada, on diplomatic missions abroad in 1873–74. Ernesto Quesada wore many hats in his long
career as diplomat, functionary, and journalist, but he is primarily
known as a humanist and bibliophile. A love of books and German
culture was acquired from his father, who served as director of the
public library of the province of Buenos Aires. Remarkably, at age
nineteen, Ernesto became temporary director when Vicente sat as a
provincial government minister. Ernesto studied at the University of
Berlin in 1879–80. Afterward, he directed the Argentine National
Library, was secretary to a minister of war, and taught at various universities. At the end of his life (he died in Zurich in 1934), Ernesto
Quesada lived at his Swiss home, the Villa Olvido, in self-imposed
exile from Argentina. He gave his personal library of eighty-two thousand volumes to the Prussian state as the foundation of the collection
of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, and it may be consulted in Berlin
today.13
Quesada’s publications about the past were primarily in political
and military history, and they treated Argentine themes.14 Quesada’s
chef d’oeuvre, La epoca Rosas, appeared in 1898. The book treated
the formative years of the Argentine nation by focusing on the tyrant
Juan Manuel Rosas. (It is based on private archives, Quesada having
married into the family of one of Rosas’s generals.) A man who became
literate only in maturity, Rosas was born in 1793 in Buenos Aires. He
13 Haenny Simons-Stoecker, “Die Quesadas als Förderer geistiger Beziehungen zwischen
Argentinien und Deutschland,” 6 pp. separatum from the Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 7.2
(1933); A. J. Pérez Amuchástegui, “El historiador Ernesto Quesada,” in Gustavo Ferrari and
Ezequiel Gallo, eds., La Argentina del ochenta al centenario (Buenos Aires, 1980): 841 –49.
Iso Brante Schweide gives the number of books in his preface to Coriolano Alberini, Die
deutsche Philosophie in Argentinien , trans. Hilda B. de Schweide (Berlin-Charlottenburg,
1930): 10. Diego F. Pró, Coriolano Alberini (Buenos Aires/Valles de los Huarpes, 1960): 292,
estimates the number as one hundred thousand. Pró reports that the donation was a source
of great friction in Argentina. Reinhard Liehr, “El fondo Quesada en el Instituto IberoAmericano de Berlin,” Latin American Research Review 18 (1983): 125–33, also refers to
eighty-two thousand volumes. I am grateful to Diego Pereyra for allowing me to read the text
of his forthcoming book, Antes de Germani: La sociología en la Universidad de Buenos Aires
en los albores del siglo veinte, where Quesada’s sociology is discussed in its academic context;
Pereyra does not consider Quesada’s views on Lamprecht.
14 A good introduction to Quesada’s writings about the Argentine nation and its language
is found in Oscar Terán, “Ernesto Quesada o cómo mezclar sin mezclarse,” Prismas: Revista
de historia intelectual 3 (1999): 37–50.
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transformed the vaqueros on his cattle ranch into a private army,
which he used to extend his authority over Indian lands and which he
lent to politicians in the young republic, who contested for power
through foreign and civil wars. In 1829, Rosas seized power in Buenos
Aires; by 1835 he had subjugated all rivals and installed himself as a
dictator with the title of governor and captain general. Rosas was animated by a desire to extend his power over all lands of the Spanish
vice-royalty of Buenos Aires, notably Bolivia, Paraguay, and the new
nation of Uruguay. Until he was defeated in 1852 and exiled to
England, Rosas ruled Argentina with an iron hand—silencing opposition, warring against his neighbors, and engaging both France and
England in armed conflict. During the second half of the nineteenth
century, Argentina drifted in and out of civil war as the federal government finally extended its supreme authority over the other provinces. 15
Rosas’s reign is sometimes called the “First Tyranny” in Argentina
(Juan Domíngo Perón’s is the second). His role is still the subject of
debates among historians and in the popular press. For better or for
worse, he set the tone for the subsequent evolution of Argentine civic
life. As a result of his probing, Argentina’s frontiers were largely
(although by no means completely) established, and following his tenure no Argentine province has successfully seceded from a union dominated by greater Buenos Aires. Rosas also determined that Argentina
would be constituted by descendants of Europeans through his ruthless
war of extermination against Indians within his domain and also through
resisting the importation of African slaves.
Rosas’s horrific ethnic cleansing was experienced first-hand by
Charles Darwin when Darwin visited Argentina with the Beagle. He
heard accounts of Rosas’s Indian campaign, and he witnessed the execution of Indians captured in the war. Darwin in fact met Rosas, whom he
first described as “a man of an extraordinary character, and . . . a most
predominant influence in the country, which it seems probable he will use
to its prosperity and advancement”—although he completely revised his
opinion in 1845: “This prophecy has turned out entirely and miserably
15 Rosas remains a problematic figure in Argentine historiography. Ana Inés Ferreyra,
“Historiografía política de los últimos 30 años sobre el período 1830–1860, a nivel
nacional,” in Nilda Guglielmi (for the Comité Argentino of the Comité internacional de
ciencias históricas, Comité Argentino), ed., Historiografía Argentina (1958–1988): Una
evaluación crítica de la producción histórica nacional (Buenos Aires, 1990): 303–12. Eduardo A.
Zimmermann provides a careful reevaluation in “Ernesto Quesada, La epoca de Rosas y el
reformismo institucional del cambio de siglo,” in Fernando Devoto, ed., La historiografía
argentina en el siglo XX (Buenos Aires, 1993), 1: 23 –44. Among older, standard works, see
James R. Scobie, Argentina: A City and a Nation (New York, 1971); Carlos Alberto Floria
and César A. García Belsunce, Historia de los Argentinos, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1971).
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wrong.”16 The young Darwin of the Beagle was not free of racist impressions, and he generally approved of the extension of European civilization. That someone of Darwin’s clear vision could express such opposing
interpretations of Rosas suggests the magnitude of the historian’s task.
In his treatise on the epoch of Rosas, Quesada emphasized the
forging of a nation out of political fragments left over from the wars
of liberation. He cast the tyrant in the image of a nation-builder, and
he saw the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the time when
the Argentine character emerged clearly. In matters of methodology,
Quesada appealed above all to Hippolyte Taine and Henry Thomas
Buckle. He was sympathetic to their positivist reliance on facts, their
insistence upon logical explanation, and their counter-romantic view
that great material and social forces determine the course of events
and that prominent individuals are only the expression of the general tenor of an age. We may also imagine that he was inspired by
Taine’s and Buckle’s rhetorical style, their love for inspired creation,
and their hopeful view of human triumph over brutality, stupidity,
and ignorance.
The central point of Quesada’s history of the Rosas epoch, however, goes beyond Taine and Buckle. Quesada sought to characterize
the spirit of a period of history, a Zeitgeist or a vision du monde. As
description is a vehicle to this end, the facts, in his view, were to be
exemplary rather than decorative. These sentiments echo the lectures
Quesada heard while a Gymnasium student in Dresden and a university student in Berlin and Leipzig.17
Quesada was attracted to writings in German because of a parallel
he sensed between his country and Germany. Quesada’s Rosas is the
relocation of Bismarck on the Pampas (Quesada in fact lectured on Bismarck to the Buenos Aires Ateneo in 1898). The bestiality of the
Argentine dictator, and his apparent defeat and disgrace, could hardly
produce a triumphalist account of Argentina’s early years, although
Argentina dominated Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century just as Germany dominated Europe. Early in the twentieth century
Quesada, in 1904 appointed to the first chair in sociology at the University of Buenos Aires and then installed as a professor of political
economy in the law faculty at the newly renovated, “scientific” University of La Plata, had grappled with Marxism and had cast his vote, as
an Argentine Kathedersozialist, for the state to intervene on the side of
16 Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Leonard Engel (Garden City, N.Y., 1962): 71.
Darwin described his meeting with Rosas in the first edition of 1839, and he revised his
opinion in an edition of 1845.
17 Pérez Amuchástegui, “Quesada,” 847.
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the working class.18 He was ready for any scheme that would place
Argentine historiography on an equal footing with the historiography
of Europe.
In November 1908 the dean of the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at La Plata, Rodolfo Rivarola, commissioned Quesada to tour
the universities of Germany and assemble information that would aid
in founding a section of philosophy, history, and letters in the faculty. The
mandate came directly from the university president, Joaquín V. González,
who was transforming La Plata into the finest university in Latin
America. Quesada was to report on the objects of the study of history,
notably “1 the concept of history; methods of historical construction
and special applications to Argentine history; 2 the general courses
and particular studies of universal history.” Quesada had already produced a similar report on the law faculty of Paris in 1906. His new task
was to study twenty-two universities—in effect, to analyze higher education in Germany in a vital field of the humanities. He sought to bring
traditions of research and teaching from Germany to Argentina.19
Why Germany instead of France or England? Quesada motivated a
German focus by appealing to Ferdinand Lot, who in his survey of
French university life of 1892 emphasized that “the learned hegemony
of Germany in all fields, without exception, is today recognized by all
peoples.” Lot, Quesada reported, held that Germany produced more in
the world of learning than all other nations combined. Quesada also
appealed to Charles-Victor Langlois, who wrote in his manual of historiographical bibliography of 1904, “The universities of the German
tongue occupied, in the nineteenth century, the first place among all the
universities of the world” by virtue of their veneration of erudition and
science. And Quesada cited the posthumous edition of the widely used
manual on studying and teaching history by the American educator
Burke Aaron Hinsdale, to the effect that it was universally recognized
18 On Quesada’s attempt to extend Marx to Argentina, and on his confrontation with
Argentinian socialists, see the penetrating analysis by Diego Pereyra, “Fantasmas, fanáticos
e iluminados en la Universidad de Buenos Aires: Reformismo, socialismo y política en el
debate sobre el marxismo en las clases de sociologia durante la primera década del siglo,”
Estudios sociales 9.16 (1999): 41–56; on Quesada’s views about academic sociology and
political economy, see Eduardo A. Zimmermann, Los liberales reformistas: La cuestión
social en la Argentina 1890–1916 (Buenos Aires, 1995): 84 –89. Quesada claimed that the
conditions of capitalist oppression outlined by Marx were not present in Argentina.
19 Quesada, La enseñanza de la historia en las universidades alemanas (La Plata, 1910).
Quesada recounts the origin of the book in the preface. His previous book is La Facultad de
derecho de Paris: Estado actual de su enseñanza (Buenos Aires, 1906). On González and the
University of La Plata, Lewis Pyenson, Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences: German
Expansion Overseas, 1900–1930 (New York, 1985): 152–53.
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by competent experts that German universities had produced the most
substantial works in history.20
The result of Quesada’s enterprise, published in 1910, is a remarkable summary of education in Wilhelmian Germany. Quesada visited
every university in Germany and sat in on every history course he
could, several hundred of them. He collected thousands of publications and obtained written appraisals from dozens of scholars. Whereas
his report on Paris had been 338 pages, the German report stretched to
1,148 pages of text, with an alphabetical index of 168 pages. It is without peer in Argentine historiography.
Quesada began his treatise by summarizing the history of universities in German-speaking lands. He relied on standard treatments, but
he departed substantially from them. He emphasized the common
appeal to humanism by Protestant universities and Jesuit ones. He took
issue with Friedrich Paulsen on the nature of the Protestant Reformation, especially its intolerance and Pietism’s closed-mindedness. He
continually compared France and Germany. Much of his history was
tied up with curricula in the German schools, primary and secondary,
to which he devoted another long introductory chapter. As late as
1850, eighteen years after the creation of the first history seminar at
the University of Königsberg, history was seen as a disjointed series of
examples of moral edification emphasizing the prerogatives of the state
over the desires of the individual.21
The largest part of Quesada’s treatise went to a narrative of history
courses and historians at each of Germany’s universities. Quesada provided long lists, and then he compared one university to another. He
frequently referred to the changes that had taken place since his youthful experience with German academia in 1879–80. His Baconian goal
was to extract generalities and mark particular practices that could be
used in Argentina. After considering each university, he treated fields of
history, providing a synopsis of every university docent’s special interests. The important lesson from Germany was that history had to be
enlarged beyond politics to consider all parts of civilization. Sociologists, notably Auguste Comte and Henry Thomas Buckle, led the path
in this direction. History, which had overcome its origins as a vehicle
20 Quesada, Enseñanza, xiv–xv; Lot, L’enseignement supérieure en France: Ce qu’il est—
ce qu’il devrait être (Paris, 1892); Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique; pt. 1:
Instruments bibliographiques; pt. 2: Histoire et organisation des études historiques (Paris,
1901–04); Hinsdale, How to Study and Teach History, with Particular Reference to the
History of the United States (1894; New York, 1905).
21 Quesada, Enseñanza, 69, 92–93, 228. On 228, Quesada begins a footnote stretching
fourteen pages, which discusses the role of history in the German School Reform of 1901.
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for transmitting general culture, was opening to consider the particularities of all countries. Each epoch had its own spirit, and the beginning of the twentieth century showed a marked preference for the
“social and economic aspect” of life.22
Throughout his treatise, Quesada had good words to say about
Karl Lamprecht, a sociological historian, who “thoughtfully illuminates the profundities he investigates” with brilliant and meticulous
insight. By the time Quesada began the conclusion, a reader would
have gathered that Lamprecht was the hero of the narrative. Quesada
emphasized that
the reigning tendency today in German universities is that of specialization in historical studies, firmly related to national questions, dismissive of the general or universal as unscientific due to the difficulty
of making it precise, carrying the fetish of analytical and microscopical investigation to the most extreme ends. This is the impression that
such instruction produces on the foreign observer. And one also sees
voices of protest in the German intellectual world. Now: The porteparôle of the reaction that is beginning, the learned professor whose
example, his works and his teaching, based on the new feeling to give
history a general and universal character, a character embracing every
aspect of civilization and all kinds of culture, granting it all the proper
importance, is Karl Lamprecht, the great contemporary historian,
whose work is an admirable specimen of patient investigation
crowned by a genial spirit of philosophical synthesis.
Lamprecht’s synthetic history was the opposite of the early nineteenthcentury systems, like Hegel’s, which were dominated by dogmatic
rules. Lamprecht offered a place for all nations in studying the “colonial expansion of the European peoples.” His was a practical
approach, a “reaction against the abuses of Wissen and the total
neglect of Können.” By this Quesada meant that in his eclecticism
Lamprecht appealed equally to the traditions of “pure learning” and
“professional training.” The polemics that Lamprecht had lived through
were in fact battles, for the “career historians” of the establishment
pronounced against him a “unanimous and vigorous anathema sit.”
Despite this treatment, he reformed the Leipzig historical seminar, and
he produced a “true monument” in his Deutsche Geschichte.23
Lamprecht was joined in his historical-sociological approach to
Kulturgeschichte by figures such as Jacob Burckhardt and Julius Lippert. Lamprecht led the pack, in Quesada’s view, because he explicitly
22 Ibid.,
23 Ibid.,
414, 497, 508.
quotations on 313, 913, 915, 196, 1055, and 197.
uses of cultural history
247
sought to study history as a sequence of “characteristic periods in the
life of each nation,” which manifest a “general psychological orientation” called a dominant (diapasón). Lamprecht’s Zeitgeist bore a
resemblance to Comte’s solidarity and consensus, where the psychology of the phases of civilization—renascence, reform, rationalism, and
so forth—passed from one nation to another. Quesada held Lamprecht
to be less dogmatic than the founder of positivism, and he believed that
Lamprecht was no materialist. Lamprecht’s succession of periods was
based on an idealist belief in the growth of “psychic intensity”; for this
reason, he was Hegel’s true successor.24
What were these periods and how did one recognize them? Quesada was no clearer than his hero. In one place he referred to five: natural symbolism, localism (típismo), conventionalism, individualism, and
subjectivism. Six pages later Quesada listed seven, and indicated that
every society progresses through them as it rises in “helical evolution”:
animism, symbolism, localism, conventionalism, individualism, subjectivism, and impressionism. Nations passed from one period to another
through an immanent process of psychological aggregation and dispersion.25 Lamprecht’s approach lent itself “to the cosmic, to the inorganic,
to the organic, and to the superorganic, as well as with equal logic to
the psychological.” Its universality was of special importance to the
Argentine observer. The global evolution of humanity followed one
pattern: “Beginning with the dispersion of peoples and races, isolated
and hostile; from there to accretion and interpenetration, increasing
the cohesion of the general sentiment of humanity and diminishing the
separate status of each people and race; finally today where there is an
integrative state in civilized countries, with a tendency to erase frontiers and suppress racial diversity.”
But the pattern was uneven and repetitive, and humanity encountered a characteristic stage time and again, as if tracing out a spiral
path through clearly defined volumes in a three-dimensional space.
Here is Quesada’s justification for brutality and genocide in the course
of building a nation, regardless of the character of the architect of the
atrocity. For Quesada’s Lamprecht, Bismarck and Rosas were simply
expressions of the dominant chord of a historical period or the spirit of
an epoch: “‘The great men’ and the religion of heroes may thus be
reduced to their true proportions: We are not called upon to worship
morons but to honor the crystalization of the spirit of an epoch, of
the yearnings for generality in the social environment.” One person
24 Ibid.,
25 Ibid.,
1035–36.
1036, 1042–43.
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counted for nothing in history, even though historians had to deal with
individual actions.26
Lamprecht, Quesada emphasized, precisely typified his own doctrine.
The times and the aspirations of the masses promoted his kind of general
sociologizing. The generation of Rankeans was giving way to a generation inspired by Lamprecht.27 Several pages later, Quesada returned to
the biographical approach that he discounted. Quesada emphasized
that the Leipzig historian radiated personal qualities that won him disciples. Lamprecht exhibited “stupendous erudition in sources and
books, an impressive personality, measured judgment,” and first-hand
knowledge of the places he studied. Lamprecht was an “imperturbable
German character, large, with a rustic trimmed beard and thick long
hair, his eyes shining through the lens of his pince-nez, his entire physiognomy revealing a frank and expansive temperament. His size and corpulence, in turn, demonstrate his robust health and augur long years of
life, nothwithstanding his excessive labors.” Quesada recorded a determined German with an expansive temperament, a man whose very
obesity was a virtue. Lamprecht’s only fault was his minuscule penmanship.28 Quesada lavished pages on a detailed description of Lamprecht’s institute in Leipzig, which occupied several floors of a famous
old inn, “Zum goldenen Bär,” in the center of the city. In its philosophy, its pedagogical curriculum, its physical appointments, and its
staff, Lamprecht’s operation was precisely what Quesada advocated
for Argentina. One had only to replace its focus on German history
with a focus on Argentine history.29 La Plata merited a comparable
institution.
*
*
*
What resulted from Quesada’s hymn of praise for cultural history?
Quesada himself lacked the political savvy to organize, and the fortitude
to wait for, a Lamprechtian institute at the University of La Plata, with
whose company he parted at the time of the First World War. Quesada
was by some accounts pretentious and overbearing, and he found it difficult to work well with younger colleagues.30 Jealous colleagues and
skeptical legislators resented the humanities’ leaving the law faculty to
achieve a more distinct identity in association with pedagogy. The war
26 Ibid.,
1047–48.
1057–58, 1060–61.
28 Ibid., 1075, 1118.
29 Ibid., 1134.
30 Pró, Alberini, 128–29. This intellectual biography is a mine of information about the
humanities in early twentieth-century Argentina.
27 Ibid.,
uses of cultural history
249
Figure 1. Ernesto Quesada, caricature ca. 1920. “Writer of great breadth,
good jurist and teacher/ who in countless volumes, drives boredom to shame/
Hispanic academic, by his mind and his knowledge/ he even knows Germany,
which is all one has to know.” The double meanings connote long-windedness,
boredom, and irrelevance. Courtesy of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut Preußischer
Kulturbesitz, Berlin.
250
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did not help the fortunes of the province, and higher education generally
lost direction during the years before 1918.31 The student fronde of
1918 at Córdoba, which echoed throughout Latin America, severely disrupted the University of La Plata, although without bringing about systematic reforms.32 In general, humanistic studies at La Plata, by no
means absent, paled before undertakings in the natural sciences (the university offered the first course in the New World on special relativity).33
Quesada’s stupefying inventory of names and compendium of
extracts received faint praise from Clemente Ricci, the Italian-educated
writer who edited the journal La reforma and taught history at the
University of Buenos Aires and the national normal school, the Instituto Nacional del Profesorado Secundario. Ricci was unpersuaded that
history German-style was the summum of the age. He sensed the difficulty of installing the enormous apparatus of historical research on
Argentine soil, and in any case he doubted the value of such a project.
Early twentieth-century Argentina was experiencing a golden age of
intellectual ferment; the realization of its unique contributions did not
depend on byzantine scholasticism and “doctorismo” raised to the
level of exasperation. Ricci, who himself later lectured on the history
of civilization and advocated the comparative method for studying the
history of religion, avoided all mention of Lamprecht and the relevance
of cultural history for Argentina.34
The publications of Coriolano Alberini, professor of philosophy at
the University of Buenos Aires and the University of La Plata early in
the twentieth century and a figure instrumental in bringing Albert Einstein to Argentina in 1925, provide a measure of Argentine response to
Lamprecht. At the University of Buenos Aires, Alberini studied with
Felix Krüger (a disciple of Wilhelm Wundt’s who became professor of
psychology in 1907) as well as with Ernesto Quesada. In 1912, as a
31 Joaquín V. González sought to place the finances of the university beyond the mercy of
the Argentine Congress by adopting the land-grant solution for public institutions in the
United States; he was unable to engineer the result. Alfredo Schaffroth, “Las ideas financieras
de Joaquín V. González,” in Universidad Nacional de La Plata, XXX Aniversario de la
fundación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata (La Plata, 1935): 19–49, on 28.
32 Quesada was visible at La Plata after the war. In 1924 he wrote an article on Kant and
Spengler for the journal Valoraciones, published by a student reform organization. Luis
Aznar, “‘Valoraciones’: Organo del grupo de estudiantes ‘Renovación,’ ” in Raúl H. Castagnino,
ed., Universidad ‘nueva’ y ámbitos culturales platenses (La Plata, [1963]): 247 –69, on 260.
33 The impact of the Córdoba reform movement on La Plata is sketched in Pyenson,
Cultural Imperialism, 215–17.
34 Clemente Ricci, “La enseñanza de la historia en las universidades alemanas,” Revista
evangelica argentina ‘La reforma,’ supplement, August 1911: 665 –73, prescription on 672;
Ricci, s.v. in Gran enciclopedia Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1961), where it is emphasized that
“his contribution to cultural history, especially in religious matters, opened new paths in
South America.”
uses of cultural history
251
young professor at Buenos Aires, Alberini published a long, two-part
review of Quesada’s enormous report.
Alberini scrutinized Quesada’s apology for Lamprecht’s “historicalsociological doctrine.”35 Alberini emphasized that Lamprecht was less
a sociological materialist than a social psychologist, and less a positivist than a Hegelian. Alberini agreed with Quesada’s opinion that Lamprecht’s reaction against Ranke’s focus on the great man and the state
derived equally from Comte and Hegel. Lamprecht understood that
the problem of value was central to history, but in elaborating this
notion he lost his way in a sea of post-Hegelian eclecticism, freely
adapting the special insights of various scholarly disciplines without
any apparent precision. Lamprecht’s reliance on one or another scientific finding, the result of his positivist philosophical education, led to
the introduction of a raft of metaphors, such as conservation of forces,
diffusion, concentration of energies, struggle for existence, ontogenetical and phylogenetical evolution, and the cosmogony of Laplace:
“Finally, there is no philosophical prejudice of the time that does not
find a place in his scheme [criterio].” Any sociology constructed on
such a shaky foundation, Alberini emphasized, was a chimera. No succession of metaphors drawn from “Galilean physics” could persuade a
clear-sighted reader of Lamprecht’s contention that the laws of energy
in the physical world found an extension in social energies. In his
emphasis on condensation and diffusion of social energies, Lamprecht
simply bypassed the essential complexities of history. Superficiality led
to a fatal flaw: “The theory of the typical, as elaborated by Lamprecht,
when evaluated in the light of historical analysis, suggests this fatal
thesis: Condensation and diffusion of social energy constitute identical
things. This is because deviation from the ‘local type’ [típismo] resides
precisely in the determination of the intersections of those historical
forms called ‘typical’ by Lamprecht.” The result was an unsuccessful
evolutionary theory. In fact, all of Lamprecht’s analogies stood opposed
to the essential unfolding (devenir) of history.36
History, in Alberini’s view, was about multiple causes, and to his
merit Lamprecht did not propose a single explanation for the past, in
the line of Karl Marx’s economics, the ethnology of Joseph-Arthur,
comte de Gobineau, and Gabriel Tarde’s psychology. Alberini agreed
35 Coriolano Alberini, “La enseñanza de la historia en las universidades alemanas,”
Nosotros 8 (1912): 56–64; “La enseñanza de la historia en las universidades alemanas: Las teorías
de Lamprecht,” ibid. 7 (1912): 97–121. Quotation on 8:57. The part subtitled “Lamprecht” is an
evident sequel, although the sequence I follow reflects the bound volumes of Nosotros in the
Dupré Library of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, acquired before 1962.
36 Ibid. 7:109, 114, 111, for quotations.
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with Quesada about the merit of Lamprecht’s attempt to infuse sociological generality into historical particularity, but he believed that it
would be ill-starred to reproduce Lamprecht’s Leipzig at La Plata: “It
is clear that a rigorous transplantation of German methods in the
Argentine university setting would be as pedantic as it would be counterproductive.”37 Alberini affirmed that the search for disinterested
truth formed the centerpiece of scholarship in Germany, and even
though contemplation formed the core of advanced learning, Hispanic
Americans were practical and action-oriented rather than contemplative. Still, a German-style seminar in Argentina, by focusing on sources
in a rigorous way, could train intellectual character. In Alberini’s view,
philosophy would have to be an essential part of Quesada’s historical
seminar; this addition would act as a sober counterweight to the dilettantism endemic to Lamprecht’s institute.
Alberini concluded his review by emphasizing the “undeniable value
that a rational implantation of Lamprecht’s methods would bring to our
faculties of philosophy and letters,” but everything else in his analysis
argued against moving quickly with Quesada’s proposal.38 Alberini,
along with other Argentine intellectuals, saw Quesada as a pompous
and superficial thinker.39 It comes as no surprise that Alberini viewed
Lamprecht as a scholarly aberration. In the 1920s, Alberini’s interests
turned toward epistemology, and his writings probed the temper of
Argentine intellectual life—notably Argentine reception of European
and North American philosophy. In 1927 and again in 1930 he lectured on Argentine philosophy in Paris and in Germany. The result was
a short but seminal work about the impact of German philosophy in
Argentina, which featured a short foreword by Einstein. In his eightypage book, Alberini cites nearly a hundred and fifty authorities, and
although he emphasizes Quesada’s pioneering writings about the dictator Rosas, no word is given to Lamprecht.40
Quesada’s understanding of history did find one taker at La Plata,
Walter Bjorn Ludovico Bose, the son of university physics professors
37 Ibid.
7:117.
7:121.
39 Pró, Alberini, cites a number of examples of Quesada’s offensive style and Alberini’s
caustic comments directed toward Quesada: Alberini reported, “In Quesada’s library, it was
said, there were three sofas: one for writing, one for reading, and one for thinking. He
preferred to use the first two” (237); following an encounter between Quesada and Paul
Groussac (director of Argentina’s National Library from 1885 to 1929), Alberini compared
Quesada with one of Molière’s doctors (245); when Quesada received the Eagle’s Cross from
Wilhelm II for his book Enseñanza de la historia, Alberini observed, “I didn’t know that
eagles hunted with adoquines,” a remark that appeared in the daily press (249). Adoquín, a
paving-stone, also means blockhead.
40 Alberini, Deutsche Philosophie.
38 Ibid.
uses of cultural history
253
there. A humanist fluent in Danish and German, Bose began a doctoral
dissertation on Lamprecht’s sympathetic colleague Bernheim. Bose
abandoned the dissertation when he received an appointment in 1928
as director of the Argentine Postal and Telegraphic Museum, but in
1939 he and Julio C. Levene published a Spanish translation of Bernheim’s introduction to historical scholarship. Bose was a sometime
member of the governing board of the Centro de Estudios Históricos at
the University of La Plata. The center, founded in 1932, served as the
university’s historical institute, and over its first decade Bose delivered
seven talks on various topics.41 Bose was interested in how the ideas of
modern physics related to historical time, and he pioneered the history
of communication in Latin America, both subjects that would have
appealed greatly to Lamprecht.42
*
*
*
What Quesada and Bose found appealing in the cultural history
championed by Lamprecht and Bernheim is what has generated intense
controversy about cultural studies in our own time. It is the notion that
the strength and vitality of any civilization—whether embracing scores
of ethnicities or consisting of only a few tribes—merit elaboration from
the historical record. This single issue has been submerged in a farrago
of uninformed and intentionally provocative rhetoric about the social
determination of ideas. The intensity of the controversy relates not to
one or another fact (although the social constructivists in our own time
have committed more transgressions against reason and evidence than
have defenders of autonomous ideas). It derives from the unsettling circumstance that the most vocal advocates of the notion that ideas lack
integrity, tenured at prestigious universities, have consistently declined to
undertake a significant and sustained foray into the historical record.
That is, the creative use of the written record, primary and secondary, as
well as the imaginative constitution of new classes of evidence, are held
by these postmodernists to be of no significance in principle.43
At the large chain-run bookstore in any one of a hundred locations,
there will be a section devoted to “cultural studies.” The books in it do
41 La Plata, Universidad Nacional, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educacion,
Centro de Estudios Historicos, Labor realizada (1932 –1942) (La Plata, 1942).
42 Bose, “La teoria del devenir y la historia,” Labor de los Centros de Estudios de la
Universidad Nacional de La Plata 20.10 (1937): 3–17; Bose, “Ernesto Bernheim, su obra y
su método histórico,” Humanidades 28 (1940): 547–62; “Walter B. L. Bose: A Bibliography,”
Philatelic Literature Review 25.1 (1976): 6–25.
43 The matter is discussed in Lewis Pyenson and Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Servants of
Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises, and Sensibilities (New York, 1999):
15–22, 436–38.
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not all focus on art or music, anthropology or sociology, literature or
history—although these are some of the topics under consideration.
Rather, the common theme is how patterns of life and thought relate to
particular social practices, such as habits of speech, intimacies of the
family unit, fashions in clothing and cuisine, and rites of passage. The
field has become known for devoting attention to prurient or unsettling
topics relating to sexuality, unlawful activity, and unhealthful practices. There are numerous cultural studies of homosexuality, narcotic
use, and medical malfeasance.
Cultural studies today, by their focus on the untypical or aberrant,
seem to depart substantially from Karl Lamprecht’s notion of cultural
history, which sought to identify the typical spirit of an age. Few cultural studies in our own time contend that the years since 1945 are
more (or less) dominated by homosexuality or narcotic addiction than
Victorian England. Rather, cultural studies tend to point to a common
thread in history: The activities and the aspirations of Victorians,
viewed through a particular lens, resemble what we do and hope for.
In one sense, nevertheless, cultural studies do recall Lamprecht’s
modus operandi. It is the enlistment of theory to explain phenomena.
Though by their nature cultural studies today are destined for an audience of specialists, they derive from a tradition of political engagement
that is not foreign to nineteenth-century historical writers who sought
either to defend the state or to subvert it. Cultural studies authors often
see themselves as advocates of a more compassionate and more just
society; they place themselves in the vanguard of a new epoch, much in
the way that Lamprecht saw himself as a prophet of his own age.
The historical enterprise over the past two and a half centuries has
consistently emphasized that historians, unlike philosophers, construct
pictures from the minutiae of old documents. Judgments and generalizations must find a referent in the record of the times. What did it
mean to be a clever scholar in the eighteenth century or a dedicated
researcher in the nineteenth? What was wealth in past centuries and
what did it bring? How were emotions expressed, wars fought, meals
taken, and journeys made? Historians have constructed the answers
both up from the bottom and down from the top.44
Because Lamprecht’s foundation of evidence and its critical evaluation were so shaky, his historian colleagues found much to dispute in
his publications. And rightly so, for without skeptical assessment by
peers, no solitary enterprise (as much of scholarship is) can enjoy
44 Lewis Pyenson, “‘Who the Guys Were’: Prosopography in the History of Science,”
History of Science 15 (1977): 155–88.
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broader utility or significance. The critics of cultural studies today perform an essential service in attempting to winnow original and persuasive insight from ephemeral prejudice and intemperate incompetence.
The present debates about cultural studies, unsophisticated as many of
the contributions are, mirror the debate a century ago about cultural
history. But if the Lamprechtian past can be a guide, we may expect to
see the genuine contributions of cultural studies severely tainted by
their association with outlandish propositions and easily disproved
assertions.45
History cannot predict the future, but it can caution the present.
Whatever the next twenty years will see in historical scholarship, the
work will surely not be a linear extrapolation of present writings in
cultural studies. It will fall to a generation of writers yet unformed to
extract whatever lessons there are in the controversy that seems so vital
in our own time.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Roger Chickering and Burton Raffel for commenting on the
text and to Maria Margaret Lópes, Irina Podgorny, and Clelia Filevich de
Chamatrópulos for advice.
45 Among the iconoclastic theses brought by cultural studies writers to the history of
science are Sandra Harding’s assertion that Isaac Newton’s Principia reads like a rape
manual, Martin Bernal’s proposition that the intellectual origin of Western civilization is
found in Africa, and Steven Shapin’s notion that the Scientific Revolution is a chimera.
Pyenson and Sheets-Pyenson, Servants; Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore, 1994): 18–20,
26–32 on Harding. For a view balancing foolishness among relativist “science studies”
writers with the popular opinions of quantum physicists, see Mara Beller, “The Sokal Hoax:
At Whom Are We Laughing?” Physics Today, September 1998: 29 –34. The “Science-War”
controversy has generated strong feelings. Paul R. Gross, “The So-Called Science Wars and
Sociological Gravitas,” Scientist, 28 April 1997: 8; Liz McMillen, “The Science Wars Flare
at the Institute for Advanced Study,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 May 1997: A13.