Karl Gotthard Lamprecht (February 25, 1856 – May 10, 1915) was a German historian.
Lamprecht was born in Jessen (Elster) in the Province of Saxony. 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 scholars of legal and constitutional history 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. Lamprecht died in Leipzig.
According to Ernst Breisach,
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'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.