Two angles: space and time.

Space: McDougall does not quite fit anywhere. Ben Shephard, author of the popular book Headhunters (2014), observes that McDougall has been airbrushed out of the Cambridge story of the great 1898 Torres Straits expedition and the subsequent histories of Cambridge anthropology and psychology. Does that make him a North American psychologist? It seems that McDougall never quite fit into American society, was always regarded as 'too English'. So he never quite fits anywhere - and yet is the most influential psychologist of his generation. So what is the story? (Is it possible that much that is distinctive about him - and that fits with neither Cambridge nor Harvard, derives from his years at Oxford?)

My point here would be to say that at least from an American perspective, no social scientist really "fit it." A number of American social scientists were emigrees and former natural scientists (F. Boas) McDougall is in this way "embelmatic" of a number of theorists who bridged a number of persepctives in the emerging social sciences. I would group William James in this catagory. As well as lesser luminaries like T.N. Carver and Edward Ross.

Also, where exactly does the idea of McDougall as the "most influential psychologist of his generation" eminate from? Is James too old to be considered part of McDougall's generation? What about the American psychologist James M Baldwin? Or James McKeen Cattell? I think we will have an issue unless we demonstrate with some evidence that McDougall was "the" most influential psychologist of his generation. I am really skeptical of this claim from the American perpective.

Time: McDougall seems to speak for a generation that downplayed education. The Engish liberals who steered England out of the Victorian era - I am thinking particularly of J.S. Mill and Alfred Marshall - placed massive emphasis on the ability of education to overcome all individual and social problems. For Mill, education would allow the working class to hold back from rutting like rabbits, and so allow the wage bill to feed into higher individual wages rather than simply more workers. For Marshall, education would raise a citizen body in which all might aspire to be gentlemen, that is, become cultured and autonomous moral agents.

Then McDougall, with his emphasis on instincts (over Marshall's psychology of habit) develops a psychology of innate differences against which education can do very little. McDougall is in fact very explicit that he is fighting against the older liberal ideas of social progress based on education (I do not understand why he thinks they were so pernicious, but he does.)

And then behaviourism emerges as the dominant school of American psychology for the first part of the twentieth-century, re-introducing, via Pavlov and other Russian physiologists, the notion of habit - but in the form of conditioned reflex. Education thus returns in a big way, except that education is now understood in terms of behavioural conditioning and control. This is very interesting....Does McDougall always emphasize instinct as against education? Is he really that "deterministic"? Is this the right way to consider McDoguall? He notes in his "Introduction to Social Psychology" that the instinct of gregariousness is less useful and perhaps is even harmful in the context of modern civilization. He continued that the instinct of pugnacity, which had led to the extermination of one tribe over another in savage and barbarous times, now causes trade wars and commercial squabbles. As importantly, when discusising the "progressive evolution of human nature", he brings up the tendency of "emmulation" to replace "pugnacity" in the more advanced stages of civilization. So if differing instincts become less important, destructive or emerge de novo due to changes in the material conditions of human kind as well as the "evolution of human nature" (I have to figure out what that means) does this mean that mankind is doomed to a determinism defined by innate differences? I think the situation is perhaps more complex and at the very least it is necessary to investigate.

So how to make sense of the intermediate place occupied and articulated by McDougall?