In 1905 the psychologist Willy Hellpach submitted a manuscript to the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, a journal led since 1903 by Edgar Jaffé and edited primarily by the well-known scholars Werner Sombart and Max Weber. Hellpach’s article concerned the notion of ‘social pathology’ as a possible scientific perspective on particular diseases, like alcoholism and hysteria. The manuscript inaugurated a friendly yet fundamental discussion between Hellpach and Weber – a quarrel which, as I will show, revolved around the relations between the sciences and humanities.
In ‘Sozialpathologie als Wissenschaft’ Hellpach launches a search for a scientifically sound foundation for the notion of the ‘social-pathological’. Rather than merging social and biological perspectives on pathologies like alcoholism, neurasthenia and sexual perversion, Hellpach argues that these phenomena can be treated fruitfully asmental phenomena to which mental causes must be ascribed (“Psychisches aus Psychischem”, is the slogan). This means that a social or historical analysis can be adopted to study the conditions under which social pathologies occur – including the analysis of certain diseases as belonging to specific historical eras or classes. Hysteria, for instance, was a mass disease in the later middle ages, and a proletarian disease under capitalism (where nervousness on the other hand is a typically bourgeois affliction).
Hellpach’s combination of engaging scholarship and theoretical inquiry surely must have appealed the editors of the Archiv. Weber, as the corresponding editor, assured Hellpach of his desire to publish the article. He added that on some methodological issues he differed substantially from Hellpach, but this made publication more rather than lessdesirable. But could Hellpach allow him one question? “Could you please consider leaving Lamprecht out of the picture?”[1]
The Problem with Lamprecht
In the 1890s the German historian Karl Lamprecht had become the center of an academic controversy resulting in his ostracization from the historical community. To most of the academics involved, this was not a question of professional disagreement, but a matter of professional standards. In his letter to Hellpach, Weber frequently invokes this language. “We take him,” Weber says, “to be an impostor and a charlatan of the worst kind, both as a cultural historian and theoretician.”[2] Everything reasonable Lamprecht has to say, Weber continues, comes from others, and “everything – without any exception – that can be attributed to him, is drivel without any scientific worth […]”.[3]
We should not allow ourselves to take this at face value. While allowing that Weber is honest in his judgment that Lamprecht represents not just a wrong scholarly approach but an un-scholarly one that merits refutation and even silencing,[4] we may still ask what it is about the content of Lamprecht’s work that offends the taste of German academics, Weber included.
According to Sam Whimster, Lamprecht shocked the academic community not only by his mechanistic view of history – where the development of the German nation was ordained by evolutionary laws rather than a moral story – but also because of the implications of this a-moral view of history for the authority of the German academic.[5] This argument does not clearly apply to Weber, however, who, as Whimster recognizes, did not support the idea of the academic as a figure of moral authority. We therefore ought to look further. And indeed, Weber took another issue with Hellpach’s manuscript – an issue hard to pin down, because we don’t have the original manuscript nor Hellpach’s letters,[6] but which is important because it relates to his revulsion for Lamprecht.
Weber’s second problem concerns Hellpach’s discussion of the philosophers Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Weber complains that Hellpach made a mistake by stating that Windelband and Rickert contrasted the ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ to other sciences, because, Weber maintained, both of them in fact rejected the very terminology in which this supposed opposition was phrased.[7]
Understanding this complaint will help us to understand the maze into which Hellpach had stepped, and how he had gotten himself into it. What did the classification of the sciences and humanities mean to Weber, and what did it mean to Hellpach? Why had it become such a laden issue?
Two Kinds of Objectivity
Weber’s methodological debt to Neo-Kantianism is well-known. Neo-Kantian philosophers, and Rickert especially, were obsessed with the nature of the formation of scientific concepts. This was especially important because of the gap which Kantian philosophy creates between reality and its representation. The way to secure scientific objectivity is not to copy or mirror reality (which is metaphysically impossible), but to turn the process of abstraction into an objective procedure. It is here the Neo-Kantians articulate a split between two different kinds of science.
One measure seeks for increasing generality: if we formulate concepts that are ever more general, grasping ever more different phenomena under the same regularities, we are making progress. The major question is whether another mode of objective science is even conceivable. Is all science aimed at formulating general laws, or is there something at the other end? Can description be a meaningful goal as well? But how do we assess, objectively, whether we have successfully described something? What measure is there for that?
The opposite of generality is particularity or concreteness, but there seems to be (though Windelband plays with the possibility) no sense in saying that ‘concreteness’ is a meaningful scientific goal. Reality is infinitely complex, which means you could say infinitely many things about any part of it, and none of which will ever be really concrete.
Rickert tackles the problem by introducing the concept of the ‘historical individual’, which is a particular object, but conceptually defined. Its definition is based on which aspects of reality interest us – or, in heavier language: on its relation to cultural values. Rickert goes on to suggest that if we can find a way to speak about objective values, we can have objective concept formation outside of the positivistic (‘natural science’) mode.
Weber is more squeamish about the idea of objective values, and – long story short – introduces the ideal type as a means of establishing relations between abstract individuals. Construction of the ideal type itself is always subjective, and objectivity comes into play when the question is raised to which extent the ideal type and the patterns it implies actually match reality (requiring Weber to ignore the more fundamental Kantian objections to the whole notion of ‘comparing’ concepts to reality).[8]
The point of this exercise is to see that there is an affinity between these philosophical debates on concept formation on the one hand, and one’s position regarding the unity of science on the other hand: did all proper science search, in the end, for general laws? Weber came down on the side of a negative answer: his scholarly agenda was informed by the assumption that there was a philosophically sound alternative. It was a legitimate scientific aim to explaincertain individual (but abstracted) parts of reality – and this assumption in turn was phrased in the terms of the neo-Kantian paradigm.
It seems that in his manuscript, Hellpach claimed that according to Windelband and others, the two kinds of science ‘opposed’ one another – which triggered Weber to write his rather patronizing rebuke. Hellpach explained his intentions, to which Weber replied, in a way that shows how the methodological issue at stake was connected in his mind to the odious influence of Lamprecht:
If you specify your position […] in this way, that these scholars have in common that they reject the dogma of the one-and-only method that you seem to maintain, then you are indeed right. If that is the case, however, you should, in my opinion, add to these any relevant cultural historians (in the broadest sense of the term) – with exception of Lamprecht and the similarly amateurish Breysig – as well as, from the theoretical side, for instance Simmel.[9]
To Hellpach, it seemed that knowledge in the humanities or cultural sciences (terminology in these debates was never stable) proceeded along the same lines as in the natural sciences: starting with the phenomena, then moving on to causal connections, and finally to the most general laws. Weber wrote to him that for many disciplines, this progression with laws at its end-point did not even exist as an ideal.[10] Assuming that it did was a harmful result of “‘faculty-patriotism’ (Ressortpatriotismus) on the part of the gentlemen of natural science – to which the psychologists belong as well.”[11]
The status of psychology was a focal point of institutional and theoretical battles around the status of the sciences and the humanities. The Neo-Kantian philosophers explicitly mentioned it as a reason why the term ‘Geisteswissenschaften’ was unfortunate – it implied that psychology belonged to the humanities, while in its search for general laws it was actually a typical natural science. For both Lamprecht and Hellpach on the other hand, some form of psychology was fundamental to the humanities. In his Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, Lamprecht observed that history and psychology had grown ever closer together in the nineteenth century. Their fortunate union turned them into the proper foundation of the Geisteswissenschaften,[12] and defined the difference of these Geisteswissenschaften from the natural sciences.[13] Hellpach admittedly had a different agenda, but to Weber the two would have looked eerily similar.[14]
Sciences and Humanities Around 1900
Weber and Hellpach agree in the end on a compromise: Hellpach is to cut out many of the theoretical sections that Weber has marked as objectionable, but several references to Lamprecht remain.[15] Weber emphasizes that while this solves the practical (editor-author) dispute, it does not solve their intellectual disagreement.
One paragraph on the sciences and humanities remains in the main body of Hellpach’s article, in which Hellpach says that there is a controversy on whether the natural sciences and the humanities have, in the end, the same goals or not. He adds to this heavily annotated passage that he does not want to get involved in this dispute. Nonetheless, in the closing part of his essay Hellpach circles back to the issue:
We mentioned already implicitly this logical faction, which wants to see the historical sciences severed from natural-scientific (or constructive-psychological) concept formation, or (on the opposite side) explicitly subject them to it. The new field of social pathology, insecure about her logical affiliation, that is to say, unclear about whether she is a part of psychology or a part of history, Geistes- or Kulturwissenschaft etc., could very easily throw herself into the arms of a doubtless and undoubted natural science – namely into […] bio-pathological research […][16]
This sheds some light on Hellpach’s original reason for touching upon the sciences-humanities question. His primary goal is to make room for a social perspective on pathological behavior, as an alternative to an exclusively biological one. In order to achieve this, he actually needs a clear divide between the study of nature and the study of history, psychology and culture. Biological explanations are relevant to the kinds of illnesses Hellpach studies, but precisely for this reason the borders between the two need to be guarded, lest social pathology becomes a disputed no-man’s land; “nothing is more dangerous to the peace between two neighbors, than shared claims upon the other territory, or herrenloses Zwischenland”[17]
This is why he emphasizes the methodological rule that mental phenomena are caused by mental phenomena. This is in analogy to the assumption in the natural sciences, that physical phenomena are caused by physical phenomena.[18] In general, Hellpach’s intuition seems to be that the autonomy of his social pathology is safest if psychology is separate from the natural sciences, but equal. For Hellpach, this is a practical matter more than a logical one.[19] He may have been a bit dazzled by the amount of conceptual firepower Weber employs against this metaphysically innocent position.
The dynamic of the argument in turn shows us something about the complexity and significance of sciences-humanities discourse around 1900. Looking back from the twenty-first century, we may well expect the main flavors in these debates to be either championing the independence of the humanities, or emphasizing the unity of science and thereby trying to bring natural scientific knowledge to bear on cultural or historical scholarship. But in this editorial quarrel, both sides are striving for a ‘two-state solution’: Lamprecht and Hellpach see themselves as presenting an alternative to biological or physical reductionism as well. Weber, however, still takes issue with their positions, because on a methodological level he thinks even the ‘historicized’ social psychology that Hellpach champions (after Lamprecht) is a Trojan horse from the science department.
This editor-author dispute shows that in 1905, a sciences-humanities split (regardless of terminology) is such a dominant feature of disciplinary classification that it becomes inevitable even for scholars who wish to steer clear of the intricacies of the debate. This does not imply that its meaning is fixed: Weber and Hellpach come to the issue from different backgrounds, and frame the issue with different interests in mind – Hellpach a Lamprecht-inspired material separation between the two but with similar epistemic aims; Weber a logical separation in neo-Kantian spirit.
The difference matters, clearly: Weber
immediately throws his editorial weight behind his perspective, all the while
allowing himself another stab at Lamprecht. “As we [of the Archiv] aim, programmatically,
to preserve the principle that the character (Eigenart) of historical
methodology is upheld aside from the right to ‘form laws’, we can (in my
opinion) not give room to a glorification of L[amprecht], even if he were
simply a ‘man of science’ – which he is not.”[20]
[1] “könnten Sie Sich entschließen, Lamprecht aus dem Spiel zu lassen?” (31 March 1905, MWG II/4 442).
[2] Ibid. (443)
[3] Ibid.
[4] Weber still mentions Lamprecht 11 times throughout his published works (counting multiple references in the same work but not the same paragraph), of which one as a ‘further reference’, and all the others somewhere between negative and damning – finishing an angry footnote in the Protestant Ethics with the remark that “Wie völlig wertlos, gegenüber den älteren Literatur, Lamprechts schematische Bemerkungen über den Pietismus (im 7. Band der Deutschen Geschichte) sind, weiß wohl jeder, der auch nur die gangbare Literatur kennt.” Hellpach is mentioned less often, but given a more sympathetic treatment – though Weber remains measured in his praise, and explicitly voices his suspicion that this “wide-ranging author” too has undergone the harmful influence of Lamprecht’s theories.
[5] Sam Whimster, ‘Karl Lamprecht and Max Weber: Historical Sociology within the Confines of a Historians’ Controversy’ in: Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Jürgen Osterhammel ed., Max Weber and his Contemporaries. London: Unwin Hyman, 1987, 268-283.
[6] I assume that if the editors of the MWG don’t mention a source, it doesn’t exist.
[7] “Beide bekämpfen ferner die Entgegensetzung der “Geisteswissenschaften” gegen andre und lehnen diesen Terminus und auch die dahinter steckende Sache ab.” (31 March 1905, MWG II/4, 444)
[8] Cf. on this Guy Oakes, ‘Max Weber and the Southwest German School: The Genesis of the Concept of the Historical Individual’ in: Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Jürgen Osterhammel ed., Max Weber and his Contemporaries. London: Unwin Hyman, 1987, 434-446.
[9] “Wenn Sie Ihren Standpunkt zu Windelband, Stammler pp. Dahin präcisieren, daß allen jenen Gelehrten gemeinsam |:sei:| die Negierung des Dogmas von der alleinseligmachenden Methode, zu welchem Sie Sich zu bekennen scheinen, dann sind Sie allerdings ganz im Recht. Aber dann müßten Sie m.E. jenen Gelehrten auch die Gesammtheit der irgend erheblichen Culturhistoriker (im weitesten Sinn des Wortes) – mit Ausnahme Lamprecht’s und des ähnlich dilettantisch arbeitenden Breysig – und von den Theoretikern z.B. Simmel hinzufügen.” 5 April 1905, MWG II/4, 450.
[10] Which was not the same as implying that laws were excluded from any domain, as Weber specified to Hellpach later in a different context (10 September 1905, MGW II/4, 532).
[11] “Hier spielt der ‘Ressortpatriotismus’ der Herren von der Naturwissenschaft – zu denen auch die Psychologen gehören – seine Rolle auf Kosten der methodologischen Unbefangenheit.” 5 April 1905, MWG II/4, 450.
[12] Karl Lamprecht, Moderne Geschichtswissenschaft. Fünf Vorträge. 2. Auflage. Berlin: Wei[d]mannsche Buchhandlung, 1909: 19.
[13] Ibid., 20.
[14] The original manuscript may also have given more cause for this than the print version, as testified by Weber’s skeptical remarks on social-psychology “als allgemeiner Unterlage ‘kulturwissenschaftlicher’ Arbeit” (MWG II/4: 453).
[15] Willy Hellpach, ‘Sozialpathologie als Wissenschaft’, Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 21 (1905) 275-307: 286-287.
[16] Hellpach, ‘Sozialpathologie als Wissenschaft’, 306. “Wir berührten schon andeutend jene logische Parteiung, welche die historischen Wissenschaften der naturwissenschaftlichen (oder konstruktiv-psychologischen) Begriffsbildung entrückt sehen – oder (auf der Gegenseite) gerade mit besonderem Nachdruck unterworfen wissen will. Dadurch im Bewußtsein ihrer logischen Zugehörigkeit unsicher gemacht, d.h. unklar, ob sie nun ein Stück Psychologie oder ein Stück Geschichte, Geistes- oder Kulturwissenschaft usw. sei, könnte die junge Sozialpathologie sich leicht der unzweifelhaften und unbezweifelten Naturwissenschaft in die Arme werfen, nämlich eben jener biopathologischen Forschung, welche ihrerseits neuestes mit Rührigkeit an die Probleme des Gemeinschaftslebens herangetreten ist.”
[17] “nichts verbürgt den Frieden zwischen Nachbarn schlechter, als vermeintliche Ansprüche auf des anderen Bereich oder herrenloses Zwischenland”. Hellpach, ‘Sozialpathologie als Wissenschaft’, 307.
[18] Hellpach, ‘Sozialpathologie als Wissenschaft’, 285.
[19] As he repeats on ibid., 306, 307.
[20] “da […] wir programmatisch für den Grundsatz eintreten, die Eigenart der historischen Methodik neben dem Recht der ‘Gesetzesbildung’ zu wahren, könnten wir (m.E.) einer Glorifizierung L[amprecht]’s nicht wohl bei? uns Raum geben, auch wenn er |:nur:|ein ‘Mann der Wissenschaft’ wäre – was nicht der Fall ist.”