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New Elitism: Social Psychology in Prewar England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Extract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a widespread effort to reassess Victorian values so that they might be retained, but in a more viable form. The new democracy was the catalyst in this introspective process which affected political thought most of all. Before the Great War the anomalous behavior of the new citizen, in the streets and at the polls, compelled thoughtful attention to political problems in England. In reaction to the unreasonable and unpredictable behavior of the new democracy, a new democratic liberalism and a new elitism came into being. New liberalism, in trying to qualify rationalist assumptions and transform the negative program of nineteenth-century liberalism, largely succeeded. New elitism, like old elitism, in concluding that the great majority were fit only to be governed, largely failed. But the elitist critique of mass urban democracy was as compelling to many people as the new liberal's defense. While liberalism has received critical comment, discussions of elitism have been limited to Fabian methodology or subordinated to analyses of Utopian programs. Yet the most formidable elitist argument came from the infant science of social psychology, developed concurrently by William McDougall, a physiologist, and Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon and neurologist. In prewar Britain, social psychology was the basis for a political critique of democracy presented as a scientific analysis of behavior.

This paper deals with the validity of social psychology as a reading of history which concluded in political elitism. The accuracy and significance of the social psychologists' explanation of behavior are assessed solely in terms of its political implications as a plea for government by an Elect of social scientists, a plea hidden within a purportedly scientific account of social evolution.

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Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1969

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References

1. While this may be equally true for the other democracies, in the United States and on the Continent, this essay concerns itself exclusively with the British reaction.

2. In 1913 Beatrice Webb observed astutely: “The whole of the thinking British public, is today the arena of a battle of words, of thoughts and of temperaments. The issue is twofold: are men to be governed by emotion or by reason? … in harmony with the desires of the bulk of the citizens or according to the fervent aspirations of a militant minority in defiance of the will of the majority? Two quite separate questions but each of them raising the same issue: the validity of democratic government.” Cole, Margaret I. (ed.), Beatrice Webb's Diaries, 1912–1924 (London, 1952), p. 15, Dec. 8, 1913Google Scholar.

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4. In 1894 William McDougall began a medical career in the laboratories of the physiologist, (Sir) Charles Scott Sherrington. From 1900 McDougall was a Reader in experimental psychology in University College, London; in 1904 he became Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy at Oxford; and in 1908, when his Social Psychology was published, he was made a member of the University. See Robinson, A. L., Introduction to William McDougall: A Bibliography (Durham, N. C., 1943)Google Scholar. In 1905 McDougall had published a study of Physiological Psychology to supplement William James's Principles of Psychology by explaining the “structure and function of the nervous system.” McDougall, William, Physiological Psychology (London, 1908)Google Scholar, Preface. A second edition was issued in 1908 as part of the Temple Primers series. In addition, by 1908 McDougall had already published over twenty studies in physiology, including an original theory of muscular contraction. See Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, XXXII (1898), 187210Google Scholar.

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10. By 1914 eight editions of McDougall's Social Psychology had appeared and the title had changed to An Introduction to Social Psychology. His reputation was so well established within a few years after the initial publication of Social Psychology that the new Home University Library of Modern Knowledge asked him to write the volume on psychology, which contained a chapter on social psychology: Psychology; The Study of Behavior. In recognition of his work McDougall was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1912. At Oxford McDougall's psychology became an elective subject in the Final Honours School of Literae Humaniores. Hearnshaw, L. S., A Short History of British Psychology, 1840–1940 (New York, 1964), p. 181Google Scholar.

Wilfred Trotter's influence, while less conspicuous, was equally important. His essays were read before the Sociological Society, a diverse group drawn from every prominent area in contemporary British life. The members were either of great influence or on their way to influential roles. Founded by Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes in 1904, with financial support from Martin White, a wealthy Scotsman who endowed sociology at the University of London, the council members before 1914 included L. T. Hobhouse, G. P. Gooch, A. J. Balfour, J. A. Hobson, A. E. Zimmern, and William McDougall. Contributors to the Sociological Review, the Society's quarterly begun in 1908, included Graham Wallas, Ramsay MacDonald, S. Jevons, E. Westermarck, H. A. L. Fisher, S. K. Ratcliffe, W. H. Beveridge, G. L. Dickinson, R. H. Tawney, L. S. Stelbing, B. Bosanquet, J. Gorst, Gilbert Murray, Sidney Webb, Havelock Ellis, R. C. K. Ensor, Morris Ginsberg, V. Branford, and R. M. Maclver.

11. H. G. Wells, the best-selling novelist of the early twentieth century, Ramsay MacDonald, the rising Labour leader, the Fabians, and the new liberals all assumed that people behaved irrationally only because they lived in an irrational society.

12. Gardner, Brian, Mafeking (London, 1966), p. 10Google Scholar. C. F. G. Masterman watched the demonstrations and knew they could as easily be hostile as happy. Masterman, C. F. G., The Condition of England (London, 1909), p. 125Google Scholar, and From the Abyss (London, 1911), p. 4Google Scholar.

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14. Burrow, J. W., Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 9899Google Scholar.

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17. McDougall formulated his notion “suggestibility” in an investigation of size-weight illusions when he was a member of A. C. Haddon's anthropological expedition to the Torres Straits, 1898–99. McDougall, William, “Cutaneous Sensations,” Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits(Cambridge, 1903), II, 2, 192Google Scholar. This was McDougall's initial exposure to an experimental social science, and he used the concept to arrive at political consequences which he never bothered to test. McDougall's final attempt to apply experimental psychology to a sociological study occurred from Jan.-Apr. 1899 when, upon the conclusion of the Torres Straits expedition, he and four other members accepted Charles Hose's invitation to make a supplementary expedition to Sarawak. Owing to this visit, Hose asked McDougall to cooperate with him in writing a book. McDougall's role in this was as a “midwife” whose acquaintance with the subject was admittedly “superficial.” See Hose, Charles and McDougall, William, The Pagan Tribes of Borneo (London, 1912), I, Supplementary Preface, viiiGoogle Scholar.

18. McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, pp. 8287Google Scholar; Trotter, , “Herd Instinct,” Soc. Rev., I, 238–39, 242–48Google Scholar; Trotter, “Sociological Application,” ibid., II.

19. For the view that early twentieth-century democracy brought a “crisis which was solved only because it was submerged by the 1914 war,” see Spearman, Diana, Democracy in England (New York, 1962), p. 173Google Scholar.

20. McDougall, , Psychology, pp. 242–45Google Scholar; Trotter, , “Sociological Application,” Soc. Rev., II, 5354Google Scholar.

21. For an interpretation of social evolution in support of a Platonic form of elitist or class-merit socialism, see Bateson, William, Biological Fact and the Structure of Society [Herbert Spencer Lecture of 1912] (Oxford, 1912)Google Scholar.

22. Both McDougall and Trotter assumed that the physiological model of the nervous system could be applied to the evolution of social relationships. McDougall maintained that an “instinctive action … implies some enduring nervous basis whose organization is inherited … which, anatomically regarded, probably has the form of a compound system of sensor-motor arcs.” McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 25Google Scholar. Trotter said natural selection effected a transition from the “unicellular to the multicellular” by the same evolutionary mechanism that changed men from “the solitary to social.” Trotter, , “Herd Instinct,” Soc. Rev., I, 232Google Scholar.

23. Toward the end of his life, McDougall spoke of “the failure of the experimental method to bring us, during fifty years, appreciably nearer to a socially useful psychology.” Quoted in Hearnshaw, , Short History of British Psychology, p. 187Google Scholar. Reviewing McDougall's contribution to psychology, Hearnshaw concluded that in “spite of his prolonged scientific education McDougall was never at heart a scientist … [he] was constantly trying … to provide the answers to problems before the factual data needed even for provisional answers were available … Even when he turned out to be right his methodology in arriving at his conclusions was often unscientific … McDougall had nearly all the makings of a scientist except the scientific attitude.” ibid., pp. 191–92, 195. Trotter recognized that social psychology was based upon deductive, rather than inductive, methods, but he hoped that deductive speculation would be tested later by “those methods of measurement and co-ordination upon which all true science is based.” Trotter, Herd Instinct,” Soc. Rev., I, 229Google Scholar. “Science is measurement,” he wrote, “but the deductive method may indicate those things which can be most profitably measured.” Trotter, “Sociological Application,” ibid., II, 36.

24. Clifford, W. K., “Aims and Instruments of Scientific Thought,” Lectures and Essays, ed. Stephen, L. and Pollock, F. (London, 1879), I, 157Google Scholar. “Scientific Thought” meant exact and universal “uniformity.” ibid., I, 141.

25. A young Liberal politician sensitive to winds of change, Winston Churchill observed in Oct. 1908 (the same month that McDougall's Social Psychology appeared) that the “only chance for democracy in the country is to ally itself with science.” Quoted in Masterman, Lucy B., C. F. G. Masterman (London, 1939), p. 110Google Scholar. In 1911 the retiring Conservative leader, Balfour, argued similarly that scientists would be the custodians of all that is highest in our civilization, all that most especially required to be preserved, cherished, cultivated, not least perhaps because we live in a democratic age.” From a speech in Balfour, A. J., Arthur James Balfour as Philosopher and Thinker … 1879–1912 (London, 1912), p. 194Google Scholar. And the new Labour leader's ultimate argument for socialism was that it alone was “scientific politics.” MacDonald, J. R., The Socialist Movement (London, 1911), p. 90Google Scholar. There were few dissenters from the faith. See Hobson, J. A., “The Qualitative Method,” Soc. Rev., II (1909), 293Google Scholar; Masterman, C. F. G., In Peril of Change (London, 1905), p. 216Google Scholar.

26. Mill introduced this concept in 1836. Mill, J. S., “On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Philosophical Investigation in That Science,” Westminster Review, IV (1836), 129Google Scholar. See Senn, P. R., “The Earliest Use of the Term ‘ocial Science,’J.H.I., XIX (1958), 568–70Google Scholar.

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28. Ibid., II, 510.

29. Buckle described political economy as “the only branch of political knowledge which is not empirical — the only one raised to a science.” Letter to Miss Shirreff, July 5, 1885, in Huth, Alfred H., The Life and Writings of Henry Thomas Buckle (New York, 1880), p. 89Google Scholar. Huxley wrote that all science, social as well as physical, “means the demonstration of order and natural causation among phenomena which had not previously been brought under those conceptions.” Huxley, , “Science and Morals” (1886), Evolution and Ethics, p. 130Google Scholar. Spencer insisted upon the reality of underlying laws of social development by arguing that to reject such law was to admit anarchy. Spencer, Herbert, Social Statics (London, 1868), p. 55Google Scholar.

30. Vinogradoff, Paul, The Teaching of Sir Henry Maine (London, 1904), pp. 1011Google Scholar.

31. Haddon, who had held the chair of zoology in the Royal College of Science, Dublin, until he resigned it in 1893 to devote himself to anthropology, led his Torres Straits anthropological expedition to record evolutionary changes in the life of the islanders. He was supported by W. H. R. Rivers, the leading physiologist at Cambridge, and by C. S. Myers and McDougall, his star students. Admitting that “ethnologists should study the existing conditions of backward society,” Haddon decided he “must leave” that descriptive process “to another.” Haddon, A. C., Introduction, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, I, xivGoogle Scholar. The expedition was intended to find evidence of Haddon's a priori principles about primitive culture as parallel to an early stage in the evolution of western civilization. Burrow, , Evolution and Society, p. 86Google Scholar.

32. In 1900 Pearson wrote that science must ask two questions of contemporary society: “First: What, from the scientific standpoint, is the function of a nation? … And, secondly, What has science to tell us of the best methods of fitting the nation for its task?” Pearson, , National Life from the Standpoint of Science (2nd ed.; London, 1905), p. 16Google Scholar.

33. McDougall wanted psychology to “be the positive science of the mind in all its aspects and modes of functioning … the positive science of conduct or behavior … [which] must be an evolutionary natural history of mind.” McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 13Google Scholar. Trotter began his initial essay by arguing that the “scientific” status of sociology (or social psychology) depended upon understanding it as “a body of knowledge derived from experience of its material … man in society or associated man.” Trotter, , “Herd Instinct,” Soc. Rev., I, 227Google Scholar.

34. In his attempt to prove the practical value of sociology, or social science, Spencer had written in 1873 that “there can be prevision of social phenomena, and, therefore, Social Science.” Spencer, , Study of Sociology (Ann Arbor, 1961), p. 41Google Scholar. Both Trotter and McDougall accepted this.

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37. Ibid., XI, 121.

38. Wallas, , Human Nature in Politics, pp. 166–79Google Scholar; John Adams, review of ibid., in The Bookman, Jan. 1909. Burrow argues that England made “no distinctive contribution to the rethinking of the fundamental concepts of social thought” at the turn of the century. He dismisses Wallas's contribution because it provided only “stimulating insights rather than a new theoretic framework.” Burrow, , Evolution and Society, pp. 260, 262Google Scholar. This misses the force of Wallas's contribution: the rejection, entirely, of nineteenth-century utilitarianism, positivism, and idealism for an empirical science concerned with conation rather than synthesis. London School of Economics, Wallas to M. M. Davis, Sep. 3, 1907, Wallas Papers; Wallas, , “The Universities and the Nation,” Men and Ideas, p. 183Google Scholar.

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41. Moore, G. E., Principia Ethica (Cambridge, 1922), p. 46Google Scholar.

42. Ibid., p. 49.

43. Spencer's synthetic philosophy was based upon this concept, developed from Karl Ernst von Baer's studies of embryonic development. For Spencer's equation of more evolved and “better,” see esp. Spencer, Herbert, Data of Ethics (New York, 1879), p. 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Biologists qua social theorists continued after the war to use this equation. Cf. Needham, Joseph, Integrative Levels: A Revaluation of the Idea of Progress [Herbert Spencer Lecture of 1937] (London, 1937), p. 27Google Scholar. Needham finds that the society most in accord with the biological basis of life is “a democracy that produces experts.”

44. Cf. the view of history as emancipation from irrational and primitive “survivals” from the past, in Tylor, E. B., Primitive Culture (3rd ed.; London, 1891), I, esp. ch. iiiGoogle Scholar. While Wallas undertook to correct Benthamite psychology in order to defend the Benthamite tradition against the Oxford idealists, Trotter and McDougall repudiated the tradition along with the psychology.

45. The tradition of sociological individualism (see esp. “Growth of Social Responsibility”) is continued in Ginsberg, Morris (ed.), Law and Opinion in England in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley, 1959), p. 4Google Scholar. Talcott Parsons has continued the collectivist tradition, attempting to give it new standing by identifying it with a “theory of action.” See introduction by Parsons, Talcott and Shils, E. A. (eds.), Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (New York, 1962), p. 7Google Scholar. Hobhouse's sociology did not fall into either the individualistic or the collectivist schools but instead attempted to mediate between the “claims of personality and the duties of a common life.” In his treatment of contemporary social problems, political democracy emerges as the via media between the extremes of individualism and organicism. Hobhouse, L. T., Morals in Evolution (New York, 1906), I, 365, 391Google Scholar.

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47. McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 179Google Scholar.

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49. McDougall, , Psychology, p. 248Google Scholar.

50. Ibid., p. 19.

51. Cf. Charles A. Beard's optimistic conclusion to his introduction of Bury, John B., The Idea of Progress (New York, 1955), p. xiGoogle Scholar.

52. Trotter, , “Sociological Application,” Soc. Rev., II, 42Google Scholar.

53. Ibid., II, 54.

54. Ibid., II, 53.

55. Ibid., II, 43–44. At the first international meeting of psychoanalysists in Salzberg, Apr. 26, 1908, Jones gave a paper on “Rationalisation in Everyday Life.” See Jones, , Freud, II, 41Google Scholar. This was published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, III (1908)Google Scholar, and reprinted in Jones, Ernest, Papers on Psycho-Analysis (London, 1912), pp. 19Google Scholar. Trotter was the only other Englishman to attend that historic convention.

56. Trotter, , “Sociological Application,” Soc. Rev., II, 52Google Scholar.

57. This was true of J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold, T. H. Green, and H. Sidgwick. See Richter, Melvin, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (London, 1964), p. 168Google Scholar.

58. Ayer, A. J., “Science and Philosophy,” Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians (London, 1949), P.213Google Scholar.

59. Balfour, A. J., Theism and Humanism [Gifford Lectures of 1914] (London, 1915), p. 94Google Scholar.

60. Huxley, , Evolution and Ethics, p. 81Google Scholar.

61. For a discussion of nineteenth-century paternal elitism, see Soffer, R. N., “Attitudes and Allegiances in the Unskilled North, 1830–1850,” International Review of Social History, X (1965), 429–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Cf. Hobhouse, , Morals in Evolution, II, 280Google Scholar, for a similar, though liberaldemocratic, statement of the role of social science. For Carl Becker in the 1930s, as for the social psychologists before the war, the demands upon social science justified elitism. Becker, Carl, Progress and Power (New York, 1936)Google Scholar.

63. McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, pp. 9, 16Google Scholar; McDougall, , Psychology, p. 145Google Scholar; Trotter, , “Sociological Application,” Soc. Rev., II, 51Google Scholar.

64. McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, pp. 38, 194–95, 226Google Scholar. Cf. the similar, but entirely rationalist, explanation of moral consciousness from the “unreflecting” to the “reflecting,” in Westermarck, , Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, II, 739–45Google Scholar.

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66. McDougall, , “Will of the People,” Soc. Rev., V, 99, 101Google Scholar; McDougall, , Psychology, pp. 242–43Google Scholar.

67. McDougall, , “Will of the People,” Soc. Rev., V, 103Google Scholar.

68. Jones recalled in his memoirs that he and Trotter started from the same sociological motives and “cherished the same biological goal … of comprehending psychology in terms of biology.” Jones, , Free Associations, p. 157Google Scholar. Trotter's son, W. R. Trotter, believed that the problem occupying Trotter's mind in his last years was how to make the individual's mind into an instrument of greater practical use. The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter (London, 1941), p. vGoogle Scholar.

69. For a genealogy of the intellectual establishment which continued to mix blood, friendship, power, and duty throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Annan, N. G., Leslie Stephen (Cambridge, Mass., 1952)Google Scholar; Annan, N. G., “The Intellectual Aristocracy,Studies in Social History, ed. Plumb, J. H. (London, 1955), pp. 243–87Google Scholar.

70. Richter, , Politics of Conscience, pp. 118–19Google Scholar.

71. When individualistic psychoanalysis came to London from Vienna on Oct. 30, 1913, with Ernest Jones's founding of the first British branch of the International Association of Psychoanalysists, McDougall was invited to join. It is not surprising that he declined. Jones, , Freud, II, 102Google Scholar.

72. Trotter, , “Sociological Application,” Soc. Rev., II, 52 fGoogle Scholar.

73. Trotter's widow told this writer in 1960 that her husband wrote his es-says on the herd, late at night after exhausting days in surgery, as a social responsibility. Jones, who was very close to Trotter, recalled that Trotter was “endowed with … a strong Savior complex … He yearned to do great things, and felt he was destined to redeem mankind from at least some of its follies and stupidities…. In later years this love for mankind changed to a considerable scepticism.” Jones, , Free Associations, p. 127Google Scholar. Jones and Trotter planned a book analyzing and denouncing contemporary problems, and Trotter wrote the final sentence first: “False hopes may be cheating us; the courage that used to resist illusion may be breaking; but surely in the long-watched east the darkness is no longer impenetrably black.” Ten years later, when Trotter was a great surgeon and teacher, he denied any memory of such a book. Ibid., pp. 128–29.

74. Trotter, , “Sociological Application,” Soc. Rev., II, 4249Google Scholar.

75. Trotter, “Herd Instinct,” ibid., I, 228. Cf. McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 15Google Scholar.

76. Cf. Becker, , Progress and Power, p. 105Google Scholar.

77. Wallas, , Human Nature in Politics, pp. 187, 191Google Scholar; Wallas, , The Great Society, p. 302Google Scholar.

78. McDougall, , Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 283Google Scholar. Much wittier than McDougall, Trotter characterized imitation by pointing out that when people said, “be reasonable,” they meant, “be like me.” Quoted in Jones, , Free Associations, p. 103Google Scholar.

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