Lamprecht taught at the university in Marburg and later at Leipzig, where he founded the Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschicht center dedicated to comparative world and cultural history.

He aroused considerable controversy with his loose interdisciplinary methods and focus on broad social, environmental, and even psychological, questions in history.

Lamprecht came under criticism from scholars of legal and constitutional history like Friedrich Meinecke and Georg von Below for his lack of methodological rigor and inattention to important political trends and ideologies.

Lamprecht's work was a formative influence in the thinking of the French social historian Marc Bloch as well as the Annales School.

One of his students was Cai Yuanpei, who later served as the chancellor of Beijing University and had an enormous influence on modern Chinese thought.