I

The part that Völkerpsychologie played in the development of the social sciences has not been fully understood.Footnote ¹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, it represented a serious attempt to establish a “social science”, i.e. an academic discipline that would study communal life, as represented by the Volk (the “people” or the “nation”), systematically and comprehensively. In order to do so, the “founders” of Völkerpsychologie, the philosopher Moritz Steinthal and the linguist Heymann Steinthal, proposed to introduce methods as rigorous as those of the sciences to the study of the “collective mind”, or Volksgeist. In its heyday during the period of classical liberalism from about 1860 to 1890, Lazarus and Steinthal's Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft provided a platform and an outlet for their new approach. After the demise of the journal in 1890 with the retirement of its editors, Wilhelm Wundt became the most pronounced folk psychologist and spent the last twenty years of his career writing a multi-volume Völkerpsychologie. Irrespective of its academic credentials, Völkerpsychologie was a symptomatic approach during a transformative period in German, and indeed European, intellectual history: based on the idea of progress—both scientific and moral—and on the belief in the primordial importance of the Volk, it represented the mindset of “ascendant liberalism” in an almost pure form. The relevance and importance of Völkerpsychologie can be gauged from a list of scholars and intellectuals who discussed its merits as well as its problems: this list includes, but is not limited to, Georg Simmel, Harry Graf Kessler, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, Fritz Mauthner, Max Nordau, Max Weber, Wilhelm Windelband and Wilhelm Dilthey.

Moreover, the impact of Völkerpsychologie was not limited to German authors. Even though few of the texts that constitute the core of this approach were translated, its reception reached well beyond the confines of German academia.Footnote ² In the United States, we find a member of the “Chicago school” of sociology, W. I. Thomas, referring to Lazarus and Steinthal's works in an attempt to refute the “absurdities” of race psychologists, in particular the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, who tried to identify and classify “criminal types” by studying their physiognomy.Footnote ³ The anthropologist Franz Boas, a German Jewish émigré to the USA, who had studied with the ethnologist Adolf Bastian at the University of Berlin, was an intimate expert on Völkerpsychologie. In a famous essay on the history of anthropology, which served as a manifesto to his approach to cultural anthropology, he referred to “Völkerpsychologie” as a major influence for linguistic–anthropological studies and specifically mentioned Steinthal's works.Footnote ⁴ As a true synthesis of the disciplines that studied “man”, Boasian cultural anthropology practised a combination of physical anthropology, ethnology, linguistics and psychology that included perspectives of Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie, but went far beyond its scope. His British “counterpart” Bronislaw Malinowski had a similar trajectory. Before he established himself in British academia, he had studied with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig, where he had started working on a PhD in Völkerpsychologie, which he never finished. Best known for his efforts in introducing empirical fieldwork to the study of anthropology, Malinowski agreed with Wundt that anthropology essentially constituted a branch of psychology.Footnote ⁵ In Russia and the early Soviet Union, Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie received the attention of the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975) who learned about their work mediated by the literary critic A. N. Veselovskij and the linguist A. A. Potebnja. In a theoretical work on the “problems of types of speech” Bakhtin explicitly referred to Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie as a way of conceptualizing collective consciousness.Footnote ⁶ Even in Japan, German Völkerpsychologie found its readers and followers.Footnote ⁷

It was in France, however, where central elements of Völkerpsychologie had the most profound effect on scholars and intellectuals who showed a keen interest in the works of Lazarus, Steinthal and Wundt. From a German perspective, the popularity and knowledge of Völkerpsychologie in France is striking, given the self-centred outlook of Lazarus, Steinthal and Wundt, and their general ignorance of French academia. The pioneers of the French social sciences, however, closely observed their German counterparts, and in the process appropriated and reworked central perspectives and concepts they found in German Völkerpsychologie, which were thus included in seminal works of the early social sciences which have acquired the status of “classical” texts. Some of the best-known French academics and intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Théodule Ribot, Célestin Bouglé, Ernest Renan, Alfred Fouillée, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss—commented extensively on Lazarus, Steinthal and Wundt, and developped their versions of a “social science” that would reach beyond traditional philosophy, philology and history in a close dialogue with Völkerpsychologie.Footnote ⁸ After outlining the main tenets of German Völkerpsychologie, I will reconstruct this French reception of Völkerpsychologie and argue that it constituted a significant but neglected process of cultural transfer between Germany and France. The French reception and appropriation of Völkerpsychologie is crucial to an understanding of the deeply entangled intellectual relations between the two neighbouring countries around the turn of the century. Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, it forces us to rethink the formative period of the social sciences: far from being an oddity that can be confined to a German intellectual Sonderweg, Völkerpsychologie was an integral part of these wide-ranging debates. Not least because of its French readers and critics, Völkerpsychologie had a lasting impact on the intellectual history of the twentieth century as part of the movement that created the social sciences.

II

When Moritz Lazarus coined the word Völkerpsychologie in 1851, attempts to characterize the essence of nations or peoples were hardly new.Footnote ¹⁰ Indeed, some authors could easily trace the “othering” of foreign nations back to Herodotus and Thucydides, a venerable tradition that Lazarus and his co-worker Steinthal were well aware of. Heavily indebted to the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), they believed in national progress as much as in the assumption of a harmonic plurality of the different nations that constituted mankind. In contrast to earlier attempts to conceptualize “national character” from Montesquieu to John Stuart Mill, however, their aim was to build a comprehensive discipline that was exclusively devoted to the study of the “folk spirit” (Volksgeist). Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie provided an amalgam of the philosophies of Joseph Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and aimed at an alternative to both historicism and philosophical idealism. Their contributions to Völkerpsychologie kept much of the romantic terminology of the early nineteenth century, most importantly the concept of the Volksgeist, as well as an uncritical belief in the Volk as the source of everything that was good, true and beautiful. For Lazarus and Steinthal, the “folk spirit” was not only an important aspect of history, but the driving force of any historical development. Hence they declared the discovering of the “laws of the development of the folk spirit” the main purpose of Völkerpsychologie. It would illuminate the causes of the creation, the development and the decline of peoples.Footnote ¹¹

A discipline that focused on the study of man as a social being was overdue, they argued, since psychology had thus far remained incomplete and structurally flawed by concentrating on the individual mind. Man, however, was “by birth a member of a Volk, and is thus determined in his mental development in manifold ways”. The “folk”, to which man belonged by nature, represented more than the sum of its parts, Lazarus and Steinthal were convinced.Footnote ¹² The individual could not be adequately understood “without regard to the mental whole [die geistige Gesamtheit] in which it has been created and in which it lives”.Footnote ¹³ One of the main tasks of Völkerpsychologie, then, was to clarify the interaction (Wechselwirkung) between the individual and the community. Lazarus and Steinthal understood this relation as an asymmetric one, since the “mental activity” of an individual was always rooted in the “spirit” of the folk. The community regularly took precedence over the individual. Individual achievements could only be understood and explained as products of the folk spirit, even though they were “expressed” by individuals. Language was the prime example to illustrate this point: it was never “invented” or “created” by an individual, but as a means of communication presupposed the existence of a folk community. For civilized nations (Kulturvölker), language was the most natural medium to express their peculiarities; it was passed on from generation to generation and perfected in the process. Equally customs, works of art and the general culture of a folk were products of a “slow and incremental progressive development”, not creations of an individual.Footnote ¹⁴ Each Volk thus developed its own “objective spirit” which existed independently of the individual “subjective spirit”. This “folk spirit” turned the multitude of individuals into a coherent people since it functioned as the “bond, the principle, and the idea of a people” through which a nation acquired its unity and became a harmonic, organic entity.Footnote ¹⁵ Lazarus and Steinthal thus presented the separation of humanity into Völker or nations as the natural form of existence. To them, differences between “peoples” were not primarily a cause for conflicts, but rather the precondition for the “development of mankind”. The diversity and pluralism of nations, Lazarus and Steinthal argued, needed to be welcomed and encouraged since it allowed for the advancement of humanity and culture. The approach of Völkerpsychologie itself, they believed, would show how the “diversity of peoples” contributed to the “development of the human spirit”.Footnote ¹⁶

Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie epitomized the mentality of nineteenth-century liberals with its belief in science, progress and the nation; these convictions were re-enforced by their experience of Jewish emancipation. While their support of the national movement in Germany represented the conventional wisdom of middle-class intellectuals, they introduced a notion of the “folk” that showed an exceptional level of reflection and analysis. Even though they considered language the most important common trait of a Volk, they found it insufficient to define a Volk by language alone, since some languages were used by more than one nation (notably German and English), while other nations, such as Switzerland, used more than one language. Common descent or kinship could not define a nation either, Lazarus and Steinthal argued, since all nations were ethnically mixed. A neat “objective” definition of the nation or the “folk” was hard to come by. As a consequence, they introduced a subjective or voluntaristic notion of the Volk: its existence and reality depended on the will of its members to become a folk and belong to it. The “folk” or nation was the result of a conscious and deliberate decision of its members; it depended on the realization of its members of their common “folk spirit”. The Volk was the “first product of the folk spirit”. Therefore its “character” was flexible and changeable, and it needed to be re-created permanently.Footnote ¹⁷

Wilhelm Wundt, best known as the “founding father” of modern, scientific psychology, was also the scholar most closely associated with the concept of Völkerpsychologie. He devoted the last twenty years of his long career to writing a general and comprehensive Völkerpsychologie, which was published in ten massive volumes from 1900—a task that Lazarus and Steinthal had not even attempted.Footnote ¹⁸ Wundt considered the Völkerpsychologie his finest achievement; it formed an integral part of his concept of psychology, which consisted of two separate but complementary branches. According to Wundt, all psychological knowledge was based on individual psychology, or physiological psychology, which dealt with simple processes of the mind. These could be studied with experimental methods, which he had “borrowed” from physiology and introduced to psychological research. This “scientific” approach to psychology, practised in psychological “laboratories”, established his fame and reputation and secured him his place in the annals of the discipline.Footnote ¹⁹ Experimental methods were, however, only of limited use for psychologists, Wundt argued, since they could only be applied to the study of the most basic functions of the mind such as reactions, perceptions and sensations. The more complex, higher “products” of the mind asked for a different approach since they could not be re-created in the set-up of a laboratory, but only observed indirectly: “The same Wundt whose laboratory functioned as the inspiration and model for numerous imitators was also the source for a mounting stream of restrictions on the use of the experimental method in psychology.”Footnote ²⁰ Complex and “composite” psychological phenomena were not creations of the individual, but of the folk, Wundt agreed with Lazarus and Steinthal. Völkerpsychologie, then, formed the necessary extension of individual psychology in order to arrive at a general psychology that fully explained the development of human life. For Wundt, individual psychology and Völkerpsychologie were the two sides of the same coin: clearly distinguished in scope and method, they formed integral parts of psychology as a whole.Footnote ²¹

A major inspiration for Wundt's Völkerpsychologie had been Lazarus and Steinthal's Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (ZfVS). He adopted the very term Völkerpsychologie and stuck to it despite serious criticism. He also accepted the suggestion that Völkerpsychologie should primarily study language, myths and customs. Wundt's concept of Völkerpsychologie, then, owed more to the efforts of Lazarus and Steinthal than he was ready to admit. He evaluated their programmatic articles critically and stressed the differences between their approaches; at closer inspection, however, the similarities between the two versions of Völkerpsychologie outweigh the differences by far.Footnote ²² Similar to Lazarus and Steinthal, Wundt's interest in Völkerpsychologie was related to his interest in ethics, the traditional moral philosophy.Footnote ²³ He agreed that any study of ethics had to build on “folk-psychological” knowledge and described Völkerpsychologie as the “portico” (Vorhalle) of ethics.Footnote ²⁴ The clearest and most concise summary of Wundt's concept of Völkerpsychologie can be found in the introduction to his single-volume Elements of Folk Psychology, published in 1912.Footnote ²⁵ In contrast to the multi-volume long version of Völkerpsychologie which analysed the appearances of the “folk soul”, i.e. language, myth and religion, and customs separately, the one-volume digest provided a chronologically organized history of mankind (or civilization). Wundt argued that such a comprehensive summary was the real aim of his Völkerpsychologie, thus stressing its teleological character. “Development” was the main organizing principle of his approach, and Wundt put forward a number of bold theses about the “origins” of social practices and institutions. Similar to the development of the individual from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, peoples developed in clearly defined stages, he argued. The first stage in this Völkerentwicklung was the primitive age, which formed the “lowest level of culture”.Footnote ²⁶ The primitive age was followed by the totemistic age, defined as a state of mind where, in contrast to modern times, the “animal ruled over the human being”. The next step in the development of mankind was the age of “heroes and gods”; it was defined by the emergence and rule of individuals and the military (kriegerische) organization of the “tribal community”, which in turn led to the emergence of the state. The “age of heroes and gods” also witnessed the emergence of national religions; epic tales replaced the myths and fairy tales of earlier times. The fourth stage of the development of mankind was characterized by the predominance of the national state and national religions, which still dominated the present time. The future development of civilization, however, would overcome national divisions and lead to “humanity”, a truly universal world civilization.

III

The outline of a comprehensive Völkerpsychologie as suggested by Lazarus, Steinthal and Wundt included serious conceptual flaws and errors, and contemporary critics did not hesitate to expose these.Footnote ²⁷ But even the reaction of outspoken critics and opponents of Völkerpsychologie shows, by default, that it was not considered an odd, somewhat outlandish idea of outsiders to the academic community. Rather, it constituted a serious academic approach that had to be reckoned with. Outright critics of Völkerpsychologie did not ignore their manifestos and studies, but took the time and effort to study them closely in order to expose the problems and fault lines related to a new “discipline”.Footnote ²⁸ The international reception of Völkerpsychologie, from the USA to Russia and Japan, provides further proof of its impact and importance. The most avid readers of Völkerpsychologie outside Germany, however, were to be found in France, where its reception left the most profound traces in the intellectual landscape. Lazarus and Steinthal showed no particular interest in French philosophy: Steinthal, who had lived in Paris for four years in the 1850s and had gained insight into the intellectual and academic world of the French capital, could never shake off his typically German prejudices against French philosophy and culture, which he considered shallow and formalistic. In particular, he dismissed Auguste Comte's works as superficial and long-winded, and complained about the fundamental “lack of psychology” in his writings.Footnote ²⁹ French scholars were much more open-minded and read Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie with interest and sympathy. One of their earliest French readers was the philosopher and psychologist Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), a crucial, but somewhat forgotten, personality of French academia during the fin de siècle. Together with Hippolyte Taine (1828–93), Ribot was one of the main opponents of traditional philosophical “spiritualism”. Inspired by both English and German psychology, Ribot was a champion of experimental psychology and instrumental in introducing “scientific” methods to French philosophy. He admired and translated the works of Herbert Spencer and wrote a major study on “psychological heredity” inspired by Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, but was best known for his studies on amnesia and the “diseases of memory”.Footnote ³⁰ A student and friend of Jean-Martin Charcot, he founded the first psychological laboratory in Paris after the model of Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig. Similar to Wundt, with whom he was in correspondence from the 1870s, he favoured a comprehensive psychology that would integrate scientific methods and concepts, but would not be restricted to it. In 1876 he founded the Revue philosophique, which he edited until his death in 1916; from 1885 to 1888 he taught at the Sorbonne, and then held the first chair in psychology at the Collège de France until 1901, which was created for Ribot due to the efforts of Ernest Renan.Footnote ³¹

Ribot's monograph on “Contemporary German Psychology”, first published in 1879, mainly served to introduce the new experimental psychology of Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), Hermann Lotze (1817–81) and Wundt to a French audience. It also included a chapter on the “Herbart school” in which he commended the plans for a Völkerpsychologie as outlined by Lazarus and Steinthal.Footnote ³² As the main representatives of this “Herbart school” in Germany he presented the anthropologist Theodor Waitz and Lazarus and Steinthal, thus ignoring Austria and the Habsburg Empire, where Herbartianism played a much more important role than in imperial Germany.Footnote ³³ Waitz, Ribot commented, had amassed facts without arriving at a clear concept of a psychology of races (psychologie des races). In contrast, Lazarus and Steinthal were the “real founders” of “ethnic psychology”. Ribot was not much impressed with their individual scholarly contributions: Steinthal's linguistic works were based on the assumption of an Allgeist or general spirit that functioned as the “precondition and bond of every society and as the foundation of moral life”. This notion showed Steinthal's “metaphysical tendencies”, Ribot opined.Footnote ³⁴ Lazarus's main academic work, his collected essays on the “Life of the Soul”, were more the work of a moraliste than of a psychologist, according to Ribot. It contained fine observations on “humour” as a psychological phenomenon, and on “tact”, “honour” and “glory”. But Lazarus resembled more the poets and romanciers on which he had relied for his studies than he did a serious scholar since he did not possess the “rigorous scientific method” that was necessary to classify facts and establish “scientific laws”.Footnote ³⁵

Still, Lazarus and Steinthal's “project” for a future Völkerpsychologie, as laid down in the programmatic articles published in the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, found Ribot's support. He fully agreed with their view that the “people” represented more than the sum of its parts, and that a specialized psychological discipline was necessary to complement individual psychology: “Next to general psychology which studies the individual, there is space for another discipline devoted to the study of man as a social being, or more precisely, the many groups human beings belong to: this discipline is ethnological psychology.”Footnote ³⁶ To make the case for such a discipline, it was necessary to show that individual psychology was an insufficient approach. Adopting the core idea of “mass psychology”, Ribot argued that this task could easily be achieved: as soon as people became part of a crowd or large group, they changed their behaviour and developed habits that the individual did not possess. It did not matter where this change in behaviour came from, since it could be observed and thus established as fact. History showed clearly to what degree the character of a people could differ from that of the individuals it was made up of.Footnote ³⁷ Irrespective of how this difference could be explained, since it existed as a fact it provided Völkerpsychologie (psychologie des peuples) with an object of study.

Ribot accepted Lazarus and Steinthal's concept of the Volksgeist, “cet esprit d'un peuple”, even though he criticized their definition of the “objective spirit” of a people as a “bit mystical” (un peu mystique). The example of language as the primary element of the Volksgeist convinced him, though. Ribot assumed that the Volksgeist represented the average of a nation; one had to ignore children, “idiots” and “retarded people” as well as outstanding geniuses to study the “objective spirit”, as represented by the remaining average.Footnote ³⁸ Lazarus and Steinthal had clearly defined the elements which constituted the Volksgeist and which would form the object of study of the new discipline: next to language they listed myths, religion, customs, poetry, writing and art, but also practical life, mores, professions, family life and the many reciprocal relations between these manifestations of the objective spirit. They had thus outlined a proper “scientific” history which could follow the model of the natural sciences and promised to elevate the study of history to the rank of a proper scientific discipline:

Still, Ribot was well aware of the shortcomings of Lazarus and Steinthal's grandiose plans. Despite outlining a neat programme of study, and despite the twenty years of its existence, their journal had not fulfilled its promises. It had provided a number of useful materials and documents, but no precise results and no general conclusions. Most of the contributions were of a literary, not scientific, character. Most importantly, Lazarus and Steinthal had not provided a clear methodology for their new discipline; therefore, except for collecting interesting material, they had not yet achieved anything, in contrast to British anthropologists such as Edward Tylor (1832–1917), John Lubbock (1834–1913) and John McLennan (1827–81), whose research had been ignored by the German folk psychologists.Footnote ⁴⁰

Ernest Renan (1823–92) did not stop at commenting on Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie, but adopted a cornerstone of it, namely their voluntaristic and subjective definition of the nation. He incorporated this notion in his famous lecture on the definition of the nation, albeit for different reasons and in a different context. To the dismay of Lazarus, Renan did not reveal his source of inspiration.Footnote ⁴¹ In his autobiography, Lazarus claimed that Renan had copied the central points of his famous lecture Qu'est-ce qu'une nation?, delivered in 1882 at the Sorbonne, which soon became a work of reference for scholars of nationalism, directly from Lazarus's speech Was heißt national? This text was Lazarus's contribution to the debate about anti-Semitism that had been sparked by the historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–96). In order to defend the German Jews against anti-Semitic accusations, Lazarus had employed ideas from Völkerpsychologie.Footnote ⁴² One of Lazarus's students, the teacher Alfred Leicht who was in charge of editing his autobiographical writings and tried to preserve the image of his teacher for posterity, even accused Renan of plagiarism because he had not referenced Lazarus's text.Footnote ⁴³ It is certainly possible that Renan, a scholar who was very familiar with German philosophy, arts and letters, found much inspiration in Lazarus's text. Steinthal had known Renan personally since his time in Paris, and had published a very critical review of his work on the “character of the Semitic peoples” in the first volume of the ZfVS. Lazarus had met Renan occasionally, too.Footnote ⁴⁴ Despite this dispute, the similarities between both texts are striking: similar to Lazarus, Renan dismissed attempts to define a nation by “objective” criteria such as language, territory and race as insufficient. All these “objective” factors played a part in the formation of nations and had to be considered by historians and philosophers, Renan argued, but they could not alone explain the characteristics of a nation. Renan argued that the “national spirit” depended as much on common memory as on forgetting, an idea that recalls Nietzsche's “monumental history”. To create a strong and powerful national spirit, Renan claimed, it was not only necessary to accumulate knowledge, but also to cast aside the memory of national defeats. Importantly, Renan argued that the existence of a nation could not be taken for granted. Rather, it had to be re-enacted perpetually, a mechanism for which he coined the catch-phrase of the nation as a “daily plebiscite”. In complete agreement with Lazarus, Renan argued that the nation ultimately rested on the will of its members to form a nation; it was “socially constructed”. Furthermore, both Lazarus's and Renan's texts were directed at the same opponents, i.e. German–Prussian nationalists such as von Treitschke whose aim was to “complete” the political unification of Germany and who therefore targeted the alleged “enemies” of the German nation: Catholics, Socialists and Jews. Lazarus, however, had employed the idea of the nation as a product of the will of its members to defend the rights of the German Jews as full members of the German nation. Renan, in contrast, used the same idea to argue against the claims of German nationalists to the annexed regions of Alsace and Lorraine as “naturally” German provinces.Footnote ⁴⁵

Within the emerging “Durkheim school” of sociology, German Völkerpsychologie was widely acknowledged and discussed in detail. The sociologist Celestin Bouglé (1870–1940), a close collaborator of Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) and from 1908 professor at the Sorbonne, evaluated Lazarus's Völkerpsychologie even more positively than Ribot had before him. Like many of his contemporaries, Bouglé had been a visiting student at the University of Berlin in the 1880s, where he had been introduced to the concept of Völkerpsychologie by Lazarus.Footnote ⁴⁶ Upon his return, he produced a study that introduced a French audience to “the contemporary social sciences” in Germany. Bouglé presented Lazarus to French readers as the founder of “social psychology” in Germany and introduced him alongside Georg Simmel (1858–1918), the economist Adolph Wagner (1835–1917) and the philosopher of law Rudolf von Jhering (1818–92), thus slightly overestimating the standing and influence of his former teacher at the University of Berlin.Footnote ⁴⁷ Bouglé summarized the main tenets of Lazarus and Steinthal's approach accurately and without any criticism. The remaining problems and conceptual weaknesses of “social psychology” were irrelevant, Bouglé argued, considering the advantages over traditional “individualist” philosophy that the new approach offered. Lazarus had shown the way not only for psychologists, but for all social scientists eager to overcome the deficits of traditional philosophy that had all but ignored group phenomena and communal life.Footnote ⁴⁸ Emile Durkheim was equally familiar with Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie, but was more reserved in his comments than his colleague Bouglé. Agreeing with Ribot, he complained about the lack of positive results of Völkerpsychologie. So far, it was little more than a fashionable term for general linguistics and comparative philology.Footnote ⁴⁹ The philosopher Henri Berr (1863–1954), the founder of the Revue de synthèse, incorporated Lazarus's concept of Verdichtung in history in his early study on “The Future of Philosophy”: “The mind is the product of history; history is thinking in epitome.”Footnote ⁵⁰ In his major work on the “historical synthesis” he was more reserved towards Lazarus and Steinthal. Echoing Ribot's judgement, Berr praised the “intriguing intuitions” on which Völkerpsychologie rested, but complained that it consisted of disparate elements that could not be reconciled in a genuine synthesis. Equally, he considered Wundt's approach legitimate, but asked for a more “positive” method.Footnote ⁵¹

While Ribot and Bouglé acknowledged and commented favourably on Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie, but did not attempt to contribute to this new “discipline” on their own, the social philosopher Alfred Fouillée (1838–1912) became the most famous representative of a genuine French psychologie des peuples around the turn of the century. Originally a specialist in Greek philosophy, he turned to the philosophy of history and the study of contemporary society, and introduced a theory of idées-forces as the motor of historical development and the “glue” of society.Footnote ⁵² In 1898, he published a Psychology of the French People which made ample use of Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie. Most importantly, he adopted Lazarus's definition of the folk spirit, l'esprit national, arguably the most original idea of his Völkerpsychologie. According to Fouillée, the national spirit was not only an effect, but also a cause, and not only was it defined by individuals, but it defined them as well.Footnote ⁵³ Like Ribot before him, Fouillée also referred to the results of mass psychology as an aid for Völkerpsychologie. Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904), Scipio Sighele (1868–1913) and Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931) had shown, he argued, that, as part of a group, the individual changed his character; hence large groups, and certainly nations, could not simply be treated as an addition of individuals. Every nation, Fouillée maintained, had its own unique consciousness and its own will, but the reigning individualism in the study of politics, economics, psychology and ethics had obscured this simple fact. Just as every individual was characterized by a set of idées-forces, every nation had a similar set of guiding ideas.Footnote ⁵⁴

Fouillée's main target, however, were not the “individualists” who had ignored the importance of society and the nation, but the craniologists and phrenologists who tried to explain the differences between nations by studying the average form of skulls or the weight of brains. He referred to the jurist and sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) and Gustave Le Bon as representatives of such an approach; his main opponent, however, was the Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936), an outspoken racial anti-Semite and follower of the “Aryan myth”.Footnote ⁵⁵ To counter the ideas of scientific racism, which had become increasingly popular by the end of the nineteenth century, Fouillée employed a paraphrase of Lazarus's definition of the nation. A nation could never be defined exclusively by physiological, ethnographic or economic factors. Rather, “national individuality” manifested itself through psychological forces, namely language, religion, literature and art, buildings, and the image a nation held of itself and of others. Therefore Fouillée pleaded for a middling position between “idealists” and “materialists”: he conceded that biological factors played a part in constituting a nation, but could never exhaustively explain its peculiarities. As the three “major causes” that formed a nation, he identified its “constitution”, “temperament” and “mental character”.Footnote ⁵⁶ In contrast to Lazarus and Steinthal, then, Fouillée put more emphasis on biological factors in defining a nation, but he ultimately and emphatically agreed with their “voluntaristic” definition of the folk spirit.Footnote ⁵⁷ The “essence” of a nation was to be found in its “conscience”, not in physical traits. Despite Fouillée's effort in outlining a balanced approach to Völkerpsychologie that would meet academic standards, he invited similar criticisms as Lazarus and Steinthal: his book on the mind of the French people, as well as a further study which compared the characters of the major European nations, merely listed common stereotypes and clichés, dressed up as social science. Fouillée had not discovered the method that would have allowed for the scientific study of the “mind of the nation”, hence his writings did not go beyond the speculations of journalists and travel writers.Footnote ⁵⁸

Wilhelm Wundt had started publishing his Völkerpsychologie at a time when the social sciences, and particularly sociology, were slowly emerging as distinct disciplines, after decades of latency. He had clearly distinguished Völkerpsychologie from sociology, and one of the reasons he stubbornly stuck to the much-debated term Völkerpsychologie over “social psychology” or “sociology” was the “presentist” outlook of the latter. The champions of sociology, in turn, could not ignore Wundt's Völkerpsychologie since it too obviously overlapped with their own efforts to study “society” as a whole. Many sympathetic critics of Wundt argued that he had really created a “social” psychology, and Völkerpsychologie found itself in competition with sociology to establish a true social science, positioned between the natural sciences and the humanities. Emile Durkheim, the French “founding father” of sociology, owed much to Wundt in his efforts to establish the “new sociology” in France. Having spent the academic year 1885–6 in Berlin and Leipzig in an effort to make himself familiar with the German “moral sciences”, he gained first-hand experience of Wundt's psychology, and subsequently wrote two reports for the French Ministry of Education on the state of the “positive sciences” and on “moral philosophy” in Germany.Footnote ⁵⁹ A former student of Théodule Ribot—who in turn admired Wundt's experimental psychologyFootnote ⁶⁰—Durkheim was particularly impressed by Wundt's anti-metaphysical approach to moral philosophy. His report on the “moral sciences” was in fact an extended review of Wundt's Ethics, which he compared to the works of the “socialists of the chair” (Kathedersozialisten), namely Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller (1838–1917), as well as Albert Schäffle (1831–1903) and the philosopher of law Rudolf Jhering. As Durkheim explained, in contrast to the “Manchester” school of political economy all these scholars agreed that “society” was not simply a collection of individuals, but constituted an object of its own. Further, they had demonstrated that morality and the law were not intellectual abstractions, but empirical facts that had to be studied as such.Footnote ⁶¹ Durkheim confirmed that Wundt's method was “purely empirical” (nettement empirique). He strongly agreed with him that “collective phenomena” such as morality and religion had to be studied empirically, and that social psychology (as Durkheim's translation of Völkerpsychologie) would provide the relevant material to do so. It was a common mistake to view the individual as the “principal motor” of social life whereas “collective facts” such as ethics and religion originated in other social facts.Footnote ⁶² According to Durkheim, Wundt's study was outstanding for two main reasons: first, it was rigorously based on facts and avoided abstract or normativist speculations; and second, it showed that morality had “evolved” according to laws that science was to determine.Footnote ⁶³

In his later career, Durkheim played down the inspiration he had received from Wundt, and German scholarship in general, mainly because he was keen to be seen as a truly original scholar, but also because he was accused of having lifted the main elements of his sociology from German authors. In 1907, the Belgian Catholic writer Simon Deploige attacked Durkheim directly and argued that his sociology was not French in origin, as Durkheim had proudly claimed, but nothing but a paraphrase of German ideas. All of Durkheim's “main ideas were basically German in origin”, Deploige stated, and therefore alien to French thinking.Footnote ⁶⁴ His denunciation was part of a general polemic against Durkheim's school and the Nouvelle Sorbonne, which constituted, in Wolf Lepenies's words, a “rear battle of the Dreyfus affair”. The defamation of Durkheim's sociology as “German” and foreign thus included a barely disguised anti-Semitic accusation.Footnote ⁶⁵ In his defence, while conceding that he had learned much from German philosophy and social science, Durkheim insisted on the originality and “Frenchness” of his approach, and played down German influences on his sociology. Still, and despite his reputation as a harsh and ruthless reviewer, throughout his career he treated Wundt's works with respect and referred to them in all his major studies.Footnote ⁶⁶

In 1913, Durkheim published a long review of Wundt's Elemente der Völkerpsychologie in his own journal, L'année sociologique. This article showed him much more sceptical towards Wundt than in his earlier comments on the Ethics.Footnote ⁶⁷ The fact that Wundt insisted on the name Völkerpsychologie instead of “social psychology” did not convince Durkheim. Wundt's dismissal of sociology as a limited and “presentist” approach revealed an odd understanding the discipline; thus far, Durkheim explained, his own contributions to sociology had been criticized not for an exaggerated concern with the present, but for their focus on ancient and primitive forms of civilization.Footnote ⁶⁸ Moreover, Durkheim was not convinced by Wundt's method of studying contemporary primitive civilizations in order to gain insight into the origins of civilization, since even the most primitive forms of civilization had come in contact with modernity and hence could not be treated as an early form of human development. Wundt's interpretation of the four “ages” of mankind showed, Durkheim continued, that he had not kept abreast of specialized research. He had misinterpreted totemism and ignored its religious and social character. In addition, Wundt was not able to account for the sudden appearance of the “individual” during the age of “heroes and gods”. Most importantly, Wundt's argument rested on assumptions of the philosophy of history which presupposed that mankind developed in a steady, unilinear way towards a clear goal, “humanity”. Oddly in a study of Völkerpsychologie, Wundt had ignored national differences in his effort to present the history of mankind as one integrated process. In contrast, Durkheim explained, the history of civilization had to be compared to a tree with many related, but different, branches. In sum, Durkheim concluded, Wundt's study was too ambitious and had forced him to employ simplifying concepts. Despite these serious objections to Wundt's study, however, he still found much to praise in it. Arguably, it was impossible for any individual scholar to answer all the questions that Völkerpsychologie raised. Wundt had done the best that was possible for an individual scholar, and whatever the “objective value” of his synthesis, it demanded the respect of the reader.Footnote ⁶⁹ When Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), Durkheim's nephew and close collaborator, reviewed the volumes of Wundt's ten-volume Völkerpsychologie devoted to his own specialism, myth and religion, for Ribot's Revue philosophique, he came to similar conclusions: As “one of the last encyclopaedic minds in Germany”, Mauss wrote, Wundt's work showed “the usual flaws of the philosopher—excessive systematization, hasty generalization, multiplied and complicated divisions”. But even specialists could profit from his work, since he tried to clarify facts and define concepts that were frequently used but often overlooked.Footnote ⁷⁰ Mauss praised Wundt's study of the development of art, especially his “genetic classification of various arts” and the distinction between “plastic arts” and “musics”. Yet Wundt, surprisingly, had not captured the social nature of art, but had tried to “explain history by individual psychology, by the general faculties of human consciousness”. Wundt had ignored the creation and the enjoyment of art, therefore his study had “no psychological life and no philosophical interest” because it was unrelated to “sociological reality”.Footnote ⁷¹ Similarly, Wundt did not provide a clear understanding of “myth” because he had missed one of its essential elements, i.e. belief.

Similar to Georg Simmel, who had appropriated central concepts of Lazarus's Völkerpsychologie such as the “objective spirit”, Durkheim had made good use of concepts he had found early on in his career in Wundt's philosophical writings. Durkheim did not simply borrow these concepts, but translated and reformulated them. What Wundt had called the “folk soul”, often misunderstood as a “metaphysical” definition of “national character”, Durkheim presented as “collective representations”. Where Wundt had taught that the “facts of moral life” had to be considered “social facts”, and that values, ideas and belief systems had to be studied with the same rigorous methods as the material world, Durkheim couldn't agree more. In contrast to Wundt, then, Durkheim did not try to write an all-encompassing, universal world history, but restricted himself to more limited topics, and avoided the temptation of an open teleology in the manner of Wundt. He put more effort into developing a universal methodology that would provide the means to study “society” in a comprehensive way. Wundt, then, seems to have served Durkheim as as much an inspiration as a foil in his effort to establish a truly scientific sociology.Footnote ⁷²

IV

Historians of psychology, their eyes fixed on the origins of “scientific” psychology, have regularly ignored the contribution of Völkerpsychologie to the development of their discipline.Footnote ⁷³ Despite recent attempts to include Völkerpsychologie in the history of psychology on account of its resemblance to a holistic “cultural psychology”, historians of psychology continue to produce “useable pasts” of their discipline which play little attention to alternative, non-behaviourist approaches to the study of the mind.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similarly, historians of sociology and cultural anthropology do not consider Völkerpsychologie a part of the tradition that created their respective disciplines either.Footnote ⁷⁵ This reluctance to adopt Völkerpsychologie into the grand narratives of disciplinary development comes as no surprise since the term is commonly associated with simplified notions of “national character”, and with attempts to present national prejudices and stereotypes as serious and sound scholarship. Sometimes, Völkerpsychologie is even seen as a form of scientific racism.Footnote ⁷⁶ As a consequence, even historians of nationalism have dismissed the once venerable approach as little more than propaganda and have shown little interest in a “failed” discipline fraught with conceptual problems.Footnote ⁷⁷

The French appropriation of German Völkerpsychologie helps to correct such entrenched views. There are several reasons that explain the popularity of German Völkerpsychologie in France. First, it reflected the “German crisis of French thinking” after the defeat of the French in the war of 1870–71 which provided its immediate context. Followed by the collapse of the Second Empire, the civil war of the commune and the establishing of the Third Republic, this defeat caused a period of intensive soul-searching on the French part, and convinced many that the military defeat was due to the superior system of higher education in Germany, especially in Prussia.Footnote ⁷⁸ A number of French scholars and academics went on pilgrimages to German universities to study and learn from their alleged superiority, which led to a wave of intellectual transfers across the Rhine. The appropriation of Völkerpsychologie in France was part of this movement, and it remained a one-sided affair. Völkerpsychologie was most appealing to scholars who were trying to establish a proper science of the “social” that would go beyond that stale “individualism” then dominant in French departments of philosophy, and thus make a contribution to the study of contemporary, modern society. The Germans, it seemed to French observers, were well advanced in this regard. And while there was no lack of home-grown French attempts at formulating a social psychology in the guise of mass or crowd psychology, equally considered one of the “precursors” of modern social psychology, German Völkerpsychologie offered French social scientists a welcome alternative to this approach, which was most successfully represented by Gustave Le Bon. Based on an elitist, anti-democratic outlook, Le Bon was generally suspicious of the importance the “crowd” had achieved in the modern age. He compared the behaviour of the foule to that of women, savages and children, who were all deemed incapable of rational thinking. Crowd psychology, then, was a barely disguised defence strategy of the rational, male individual against the onslaught of the democratic age that promised to emancipate previously excluded groups. As such, it had little in common with Völkerpsychologie, which was based on a positive, even idealized view of the Volk as the origin of culture and civilization. Völkerpsychologie thus offered a perspective for those French authors who might have accepted the main tenets of Le Bon's crowd psychology, but did not agree with the political ideology that underpinned it. Furthermore, Völkerpsychologie provided an alternative to the simplified theories of physical anthropology. While Lazarus, Steinthal and Wundt had not even engaged in a discussion of physical anthropology, but simply dismissed it as insufficient, Alfred Fouillée in particular employed Völkerpsychologie to this end.

In addition, and in contrast to colleagues in English-speaking countries, French academics and intellectuals had fewer problems with translating the peculiar German term Völkerpsychologie, which helped the transfer of German concepts to France considerably. The term itself could be rendered accurately as psychologie des peuples—keeping the plural of Völker, in contrast to the English translation “folk psychology”. However, only Fouillée used this literal translation psychologie des peuples emphatically and consistently. Ribot introduced it alongside psychologie des races and psychologie ethnique, and Bouglé, true to the Durkheim school, preferred to speak of psychologie sociale. Similarly, the awkward but crucial term Volksgeist could be translated into French as esprit national, or, more liberally, as esprit public. This inconsistence in the use of the terminology of Völkerpsychologie was not merely a problem of translation, but one of definition: A number of German reviewers of Lazarus, Steinthal and Wundt had expressed their concerns about the suitability of the very label Völkerpsychologie. While agreeing with the general aims and outline of the new “discipline”, they found its name misleading, inaccurate or even pretentious. Most French readers of German Völkerpsychologie agreed with this view, and Durkheim made the most succesful suggestion when he introduced Wundt's concept of a Volksseele as représentations collectives. Even though Durkheim agreed that the collective representations of each nation were distinct and unique—thus attesting the importance of the nation for his sociology—his free “translation” of Wundt's term proved more successful than the German original with its romantic baggage. The level of abstraction of Durkheim's terminology made its future popularity possible: It was in the works of the French “founding father” of sociology that the central concept of Völkerpsychologie survived, albeit in altered form and thus well hidden.Footnote ⁷⁹