He studied history, political science, economics, and art at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Munich (1874–79). In 1878 he completed his doctoral dissertation at Leipzig on the 11th-century French economy. The influence upon him of Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, with its emphasis on psychological characteristics of certain historical epochs, was evident in one of Lamprecht’s earliest essays, also published in 1878, “Individuality and Its Comprehension in the German Middle Ages,” which first stated his critique of exterior factual data as the focus of scientific history. In 1879 he tutored in Cologne and taught at the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium. His Initialornamentik. . . (1882) dealt with the psychological implications of 8th- to 13th-century artistic ornamentation and symbolism and provided the core for his later and more elaborated theory.
Lamprecht moved to Bonn (1881), where he jointly established a society for the study of Rhenish history (1883) and a journal on West German history and art (1882) and was appointed professor at the University of Bonn (1885). While he was at Bonn one of his best works, Deutsches Wirtschaftsleben im Mittelalter, 3 vol., (1885–86; “German Economic Life in the Middle Ages”), appeared. In 1890 he taught at the University of Marburg and a year later was made professor of history at the University of Leipzig.
Lamprecht’s master work was the massive Deutsche Geschichte, 12 vol. (1891–1901; “German History”). It was a major contribution to the development of the Kulturgeschichte (History of Civilization) school in Germany and the centre of a heated controversy over the meaning of “scientific history.” While he put special emphasis on economic groups and mass movements in social history, his principal thesis was that history achieves scientific status not through exactitude of detail in particular instances but rather through the achievement of a general and philosophical synthesis arising from the comparative study of collective psychologies in given periods of time.
Lamprecht’s approach to history provoked great controversy, and he was highly criticized for his reductionist analysis, a priori system, and inadequately documented generalizations. It led, however, to a reexamination of historical methods and to the acceptance of social and cultural history as a legitimate sphere of scholarly research.