One of the striking things about McDougall is that he is such a born insider - wealthy, gentrified, tweed-coast Englishman - who is always on the outside. He is clearly on the periphery of the Cambridge scene, he never fits in at Oxford (where the philosophers look down on the science of psychology), and he never manages to make it in America - where he seems to be marginalized and characterized as an arrogant Englishman.

Shephard in Headhunters picks up on this, and I think perhaps McDougall himself talks about it in his autobiographical essay.

But I wonder if this provides a useful angle for us - McDougall's continual insider-outsiderness helping to generate a map of the established social and intellectual landscape: always pointing to the heart of things, always articulating a position in some way in opposition to it.