КУЛЬТУРНО-ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ ПОДХОД

Cultural-Historical Approach

A form of idealistic rationalisation of the internal indivisibility and unity of the historical process. It was suggested towards the close of the 19th century by K. Lamprecht (1856-1915), a German historian of liberal views. Lamprecht challenged the individualisation method prevalent in bourgeois historicity, i.e., the reduction of historiography to a description of the lives of outstanding personalities (Ranke and his school).

According to Lamprecht, the concept of culture facilitates a synthesis of the various aspects of social life. Culture is seen as a spontaneous consciousness woven directly into material relationships and reflected in the folk ways of a community. Cultural-Historical Approach is a half-hearted attempt at an idealistic solution of the crisis of bourgeois historicity—by a purely eclectic association of individual aspects of social life in the conception of culture and by recognition of material and economic relationships as merely one of the factors of spiritual evolution.

Nevertheless, its insistence on regarding history as a study of the laws of social development was a distinct merit of the Cultural-Historical Approach as compared with the other methods of bourgeois historiography. In contemporaneous Western literature on the philosophy of history the Cultural-Historical Approach has been ousted by outright subjectivist theories.