Otto Hintze: The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze

Otto Hintze's response to Karl Lamprecht's Was Ist Kulturgeschichte?:

Hintze's essay tackes the old debate over historical laws: are events of such a nature that they can be generally arranged in some form of order or unique in their appearance. Psychological investigation, rather than the quarrel over teleology and materialism, altered the fight over why typical patterns emerge in historical development.

Social psychology has its roots in the idealistic spirit that provoked many German philosophers to believe a mass psychology of a nation impacts, if not determines, the destiny of a people.

Historians know of no driving forces other than those carried out by men, not as individuals, but in connection with their time and place. A man shaped by the assumptions of his era give life to all institutions.

For Lamprecht, the mind of the individual and the mind of the society are two separate entitites. All in a group are ruled by the emotions and ideas common to the group. In other words, members of every group, though they vary in minor ways at an individual level, are nonetheless ruled by the emotions, ideas, and desires common to the group.

Ideas have their ultimate origin in thepsychology of the minds of individuals and are therefore subjected to individual impulses. More advanced societies have more options for breaking in conformity. Individual are essential for change and a society progresses as the variance between traditional norms and new ones.

Assuming that individuals are the catalysts for the creation of "history," how does one determine how and why certain people at certain times emerge? Why is it some people are more successful than others in altering their environments?

For Hintze, this task is too arduous for the historian:

"Historians deal with people whose consciousnesses are already fully formed. We can understand them only on an act of artistic insight, founded on careful research."

The life of an individual and the life of a society can be described and analyzed, but the connection between the individual and the group cannot be made given the limits of source material available. In this manner, the distinction between cultural and political history is meaningless for Hintze because the individual and the group evolve and react against one another.

Using a metaphor, Hintze writes:

"We want to know not just the summits and peaks of the range, but also the base of the mountain."

In this respect, he advocates employing social psychological tools to illuminate the trajectory of world history. Rather than dividing the various chronologies of events into national stories, Hintze wants to examine the "universal cultural forces" that shape the behavior of nations which are reactions to world events.