Folk Psychology - The Science of Collective Spirit (1860-1920)

Kai Froeb2026

This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.

Folk psychology arises from a systematic problem: how can Hegel’s “objective spirit” be scientifically investigated? Hegel had shown that spirit is not merely individual. There are collective objectifications – language, myth, custom, law, art. These are neither merely subjective representations nor merely objective things, but spiritual realities: created by human beings, yet preceding and determining each individual. Language exists before me, shapes my thinking, yet is nothing apart from the speaking of all speakers. This is the structure of objective spirit.[1]

The question is: can these spiritual realities be investigated empirically? Can one study how languages develop, how myths arise, how customs change – not merely describing them historically, but with the scientific ambition of finding regularities?

The Founders: Lazarus and Steinthal

Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899) founded the “Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft” (Journal for Folk Psychology and Linguistics) in 1860. Their program was explicitly Hegelian: to establish the psychology of objective spirit as an empirical science.[2]

Lazarus formulated the project in the opening article: “The spirit of a people expresses itself in language, myth, custom, and these works in turn exert force over individuals. Language […] is the first and most important product of the spirit of the people; and it is at the same time its most effective organ.” Folk psychology was to investigate “how the people forms out of individuals, and how objective spirit forms out of its soul.”[3]

The method was to be empirical: comparing languages, collecting myths, documenting customs. But the goal was philosophical: to find the laws according to which objective spirit develops. Not merely a historical collection of facts, but a systematic science of spirit in its collective objectifications.

The basic thesis was: objective spirit is not a metaphysical construction, but a psychological reality. It exists in the representations, feelings, and acts of will of individuals – but as shared representations, feelings, acts of will. Language is in my head (I think in words), but it is not my creation. It is a collective product that shapes me. This double structure – individual and collective at once – was what folk psychology was meant to investigate.[4]

Critique: This psychologization was problematic. Hegel’s objective spirit was not collective psychology. Law and morality are not merely “shared representations,” but normative structures with a claim to validity. The prohibition against murder holds even if everyone felt otherwise about it. Folk psychology threatened to reduce normativity to facticity – true is what everyone believes; right is what everyone does. This misses Hegel’s point: objective spirit must justify itself before reason, not merely exist as a matter of fact.[5]

Wilhelm Wundt and the Monumental Synthesis

Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), founder of experimental psychology in Leipzig, carried out an enormous expansion of the program. His ten-volume Völkerpsychologie (1900-1920) is the most comprehensive attempt to grasp Hegel’s objective spirit empirically.[6]

The structure:

  • Volumes 1-2: Language (1900) – phonetics, grammar, semantics, language change
  • Volume 3: Art (1908) – ornamentation, sculpture, painting, music, poetry
  • Volumes 4-6: Myth and Religion (1905-1909) – animism, totemism, belief in gods, hero myths
  • Volumes 7-8: Society (1917) – family, tribe, state, law
  • Volume 9: Law (1918)
  • Volume 10: Culture and History (1920)

The work is of breathtaking erudition. Wundt processes linguistic, ethnological, religious-studies, and legal research from all over the world. He wants to show: there are universal stages of development of spirit, visible in language, myth, custom. Spirit develops from primitive to complex forms – and this development follows laws that folk psychology can work out.[7]

Wundt’s reference to Hegel is explicit. He writes: “If one wishes to grant […] Hegelian philosophy […] an exceptional merit, this can only lie in its effort to unite the entire phenomena of spiritual life in one system.” Folk psychology, he claims, is the empirical realization of this program – Hegel’s system, but scientifically grounded.[8]

The problems:

1. Evolutionism: Wundt arranges cultures hierarchically. There are “primitive” peoples (animism, imageless languages, tribal societies) and “developed” peoples (monotheism, abstract concepts, states governed by law). This hierarchy allegedly corresponds to historical development: all peoples pass through the same stages, only at different speeds. This is evolutionist Eurocentrism – European culture as the standard by which all others are measured.[9]

2. Collection instead of system: Despite its systematic ambition, the work remains descriptive. Wundt collects an immense amount of material, but the systematic unity is lost. Where is the concept that grasps language, myth, and law as moments of one process? Hegel had tried to develop this unity dialectically. Wundt strings chapters together. The empirical abundance smothers the conceptual penetration.[10]

3. Psychologism: The fundamental difficulty remains. Wundt wants to find laws of spirit – but does he not merely find laws of psychology? Is logic reducible to the psychology of thinking? Is law reducible to the psychology of law? Phenomenology (Husserl) and neo-Kantianism will sharply criticize this reduction: validity is not facticity. That all human beings think something does not make it true. That all societies practice something does not make it right.[11]

The Impact and the End

Folk psychology had an enormous impact – but not in philosophy. It shaped the emerging cultural sciences: linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure studied under Steinthal), ethnology (Bronisław Malinowski drew on Wundt), the study of religion (Rudolf Otto knew Wundt’s volumes on myth). The empirical investigation of collective spiritual phenomena became a matter of course – but as individual sciences, not as a philosophical discipline.[12]

Philosophically, folk psychology was marginalized. Phenomenology (Husserl) criticized its psychologism. Neo-Kantianism (Rickert, Cassirer) developed its own theories of culture. Interpretive sociology (Simmel, Weber) took over its questions, but not its psychologistic foundation. After Wundt’s death (1920), the discipline collapsed – too cumbersome, too descriptive, too little conceptual.[13]

The Transition to Vygotsky: From Germany to Russia

This line is productively transformed in the Soviet Union. Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) knew Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie closely and developed it further into cultural-historical psychology. Vygotsky’s basic thesis: human consciousness develops through tools (technology) and signs (language). Both are cultural mediations – not individual inventions, but collective products that structure thought. The child learns not merely words, but forms of thought. Language shapes consciousness.[14]

This is Hegel’s objective spirit, transformed materialistically: spirit does not arise from itself (as in Hegel), but from the appropriation of cultural tools. But these tools are themselves spiritual – they embody collective practice, accumulated knowledge, congealed history. The dialectic of individual and collective, of subjectivity and objectivity, which Hegel had developed speculatively, becomes empirical developmental psychology in Vygotsky.[15]

Vygotsky dies young (1934, at 37), and his works are banned under Stalin (insufficiently dogmatic). But his students (Luria, Leontiev) develop cultural-historical psychology further, and it is received internationally today. The Russian line of folk psychology proves more fruitful than the German one – because it takes the materialist basis seriously without abandoning the dialectical structure. (For a detailed account, see Chapter 14.X)[16]

The systematic lesson: Objective spirit is empirically researchable – but not as psychology. Folk psychology fails on psychologism. What is missing is the reflection-logical foundation: the insight that collective spiritual phenomena are self-referential structures, not merely psychic states. Language is not the sum of individual speech acts, but a system that reproduces itself. Law is not the sum of individual legal representations, but an institution that norms actions. This self-referential structure cannot be grasped psychologically – it requires structural or systems-theoretical approaches (developed in the twentieth century: Saussure, Luhmann, Brandom).

  1. Hegel: Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), Third Part: Philosophy of Spirit, §§ 483-552. Objective spirit comprises: law (§§ 483-494), morality (§§ 505-512), ethical life (§§ 513-552). ↩︎

  2. Moritz Lazarus / Heymann Steinthal: “Introductory Thoughts on Folk Psychology,” in: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 1 (1860), pp. 1-73. On the biography of both, see: Ingrid Belke: Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal. Die Begründer der Völkerpsychologie in ihren Briefen, Tübingen: Mohr, 1971. ↩︎

  3. Lazarus: “Introductory Thoughts,” pp. 2-3. The explicit reference to Hegel is found on p. 32: “What Hegel calls objective spirit is the actual object of our science.” ↩︎

  4. The basic thesis is systematically developed in: Moritz Lazarus: Das Leben der Seele in Monographien über seine Erscheinungen und Gesetze, 3 vols., Berlin: Dümmler, 1855-1857, esp. vol. 2, pp. 401-478 (“The Spirit of the People”). ↩︎

  5. This critique is formulated early on by Wilhelm Dilthey: “Über das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat” (1875), in: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, Stuttgart: Teubner, 1957, pp. 31-73, esp. pp. 45-48. ↩︎

  6. Wilhelm Wundt: Völkerpsychologie. Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, 10 vols., Leipzig: Engelmann/Kröner, 1900-1920. A monumental work of over 6,000 pages. ↩︎

  7. Wundt distinguishes four stages of development: (1) primitive man (animism), (2) totemistic man (clan system), (3) the age of heroes and gods (polytheism, city-states), (4) the age of humanity (monotheism, nation-states). Völkerpsychologie, vol. 4, pp. 1-15. ↩︎

  8. Wundt: Völkerpsychologie, vol. 1, preface, p. VI. Wundt, however, also stresses the difference: Hegel deduces a priori, whereas he himself proceeds empirically. ↩︎

  9. On the critique of evolutionist Eurocentrism, see: George W. Stocking: Victorian Anthropology, New York: Free Press, 1987. On the problem in Wundt: Matthias Wunsch: Fragen der Völkerpsychologie im Werk Wilhelm Wundts, Münster: Waxmann, 2013, pp. 156-183. ↩︎

  10. Cf. the contemporary critique by Ernst Cassirer: The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1923, pp. 6-8: Wundt’s folk psychology offers “an abundance of material,” but no “philosophical penetration.” ↩︎

  11. Foundational for the critique of psychologism: Edmund Husserl: Logical Investigations, vol. 1: Prolegomena to Pure Logic, Halle: Niemeyer, 1900, §§ 17-51. Husserl does not explicitly name folk psychology, but his critique applies to it. ↩︎

  12. On the impact on the cultural sciences, see: Gustav Jahoda: A History of Social Psychology, Cambridge: CUP, 2007, chap. 6. On the reception in ethnology: George W. Stocking: “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski,” in: Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, pp. 70-120. ↩︎

  13. After Wundt’s death, no new syntheses of folk psychology appear. The journal ceases publication in 1890. As a separate discipline, folk psychology disappears. Its themes are taken over by cultural anthropology, linguistics, the sociology of religion. ↩︎

  14. Lev S. Vygotsky: Thought and Language (1934), German ed. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1964, esp. chap. 7: “Thought and Word.” The basic thesis: “The word is not the label that is stuck onto the finished stock of thought, but […] the immediate expression of thought.” (p. 301) ↩︎

  15. Vygotsky studied Hegel and Marx intensively. His notebook contains extensive excerpts from Hegel. See: René van der Veer / Jaan Valsiner: Understanding Vygotsky: A Quest for Synthesis, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, pp. 227-249. ↩︎

  16. On the international reception of Vygotsky, see: Alex Kozulin: Vygotsky’s Psychology: A Biography of Ideas, Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP, 1990. On its current significance: Michael Cole: Cultural Psychology, Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP, 1996. ↩︎