Unity or disunity of the sciences? The German debate around 1900

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the intense and prolonged debates concerning the relationships between the natural, social and historical sciences in German-speaking academia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the paper focuses on discussions over cultural history (Schäfer versus Gothein; Buckle and Du Bois-Raymond versus Droysen and Lorenz; von Below versus Lamprecht); the position of psychology (Steinthal, Lazarus, Wundt, Dilthey); the role of the social sciences (Mohl versusTreitschke and Dilthey); the goals of economics (Knies, Schmoller, Treitschke, Menger, Weber); neo-Kantian conceptions and their rivals (Lange, Cohen, Windelband, Rickert, Dilthey, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche); and the road from Marxism to sociology (Marx, Lassalle, Stammler, Tönnies, Sombart, Simmel). I conclude by gesturing at ways in which these debates were related to social-political controversies.