Collectivity, human fulfilment and the ‘force of life’: Wilfred Trotter’s concept of the herd...

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2014 27: 21 originally published online 12 December 2013History of the Human SciencesGillian Swanson

of the herd instinct in early 20th-century BritainCollectivity, human fulfilment and the 'force of life': Wilfred Trotter's concept

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Article

Collectivity, humanfulfilment and the ‘forceof life’: Wilfred Trotter’sconcept of the herd instinctin early 20th-century Britain

Gillian SwansonUniversity of the West of England, Bristol, UK

AbstractThe article traces the origination of the psychological concept of the ‘herd instinct’,popularized by British surgeon Wilfred Trotter, locating this in a distinctive moment ofdialogue between the natural and human sciences. It challenges the incorrect associationof Trotter’s model with the crowd theory of Gustave Le Bon and negative commentarieson mass culture. In contrast, it shows that Trotter’s model rests on imitation and sug-gestion not as the sign of a derogated culture but as the ground of associated life, withaltruism as its highest expression. His argument that individuals possessed an inherentcapacity for association and a disposition to act in the interests of the social group wasdesigned to challenge the hierarchical models of Social Darwinism. Instead, he high-lighted the evolutionary importance of variability and innovation and proposed a hor-izontal model of cooperation as the basis of adaptation. Trotter’s narrative of humanpotential pre-dated and informed Freud’s own collective psychology, as well as providingan influential challenge to his theory of repression. The widespread take-up of Trotter’smodel of the herd instinct in the context of futures thinking, forming the basis of an ega-litarian approach to governance that proposed human fulfilment and social progress ascomplementary aims, supports the article’s argument that psychological approaches tocollectivity were well established prior to the First World War rather than formed inresponse to it, and that these were embedded within social thinking across the politicalspectrum, rather than derived for instrumentally conservative purposes.

Corresponding author:

Gillian Swanson, University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK.

Email: [email protected]

History of the Human Sciences2014, Vol. 27(1) 21–50

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Keywordsaltruism, crowd theory, herd instinct, psychology, social feeling

The herd instinct, as a concept, has been in popular use for more than a century. During

that time, it has become associated with crowd behaviour, particularly civil disturbance.1

Conventionally used to account for behaviour that transgresses social proscriptions in the

pursuit of selfish aims, it implies a temporary lapse of reason and moral discipline. With

the social forces or moral constraints that impede naked self-interest removed, individual

action is directed by the cumulative momentum of pack instinct: swept up in the animal-

istic mob, acting without conscious control, reduced to savagery. By extension, the herd

instinct is also used to account for the individual’s susceptibility to an irrational form of

imitative behaviour characteristic of mass societies.2

But this was not the meaning of the term as it was used in social and futures thinking in

early 20th-century Britain. In the first decade of the century the concept of the herd instinct

was deployed by social progressives to point to a basic human capacity for ‘association’

and a discomfort in loneliness, bringing into vision human dependency and vulnerability;

the limits of ‘life’ understood in terms of an individual organism. It was also used to point

to the individual’s susceptibility to the pressure of social convention, the emotional basis of

group life and a collective investment in a common future. The herd instinct could lead to

positive or negative actions, depending on the way external influences pressed upon the

individual. In its highest manifestation, it was linked to the capacity for altruism.

This article focuses on its emergence within a neglected but influential area of British

psychology that aimed to explain not just individual development and adaptation, but the

emotional dynamics of human association and collective life. It has become common to

attribute the popular take-up of psychological and psychoanalytic models and their direc-

tion to social adaptation and the dynamics of group life to the threat or experience of the

First World War (e.g. Richards, 2000: 187, 221). Daniel Pick, for example, argues that

the war experience was significant in the rethinking of instincts and collective processes,

which though correct overlooks its pre-war origination and by privileging the emergence

of a psychoanalytic model, also elides the distinctive embryology of the conceptual fra-

meworks developed in the British context (Pick, 1995: 39–61). What also becomes clear

when we examine the intellectual history of a distinctively British collective psychology

that aimed to explain not just individual development and adaptation, but the emotional

dynamics of human association and group life, is that it contributed to a more expansive

political vision than was being offered by negative accounts of irrational and destructive

forces operating in mass societies. I will argue that the attention given to crowd psychol-

ogy in histories of inter-war anxiety over the management of urban populations and the

influence of mass culture overstresses its prevalence in psychological thinking in this

period, and the routine invocation that the development of collective psychology was dri-

ven by a ‘fear’ of the irrational and ‘suggestible’ crowd (e.g. Moscovici, 1985 and Maz-

zarella, 2010) has led a more complex, socially nuanced and politically hybrid set of

debates concerning the nature of associated life to become eclipsed. The variegated

impulses underlying the human capacity for association embodied in these models

22 History of the Human Sciences 27(1)




allowed a British turn to the ordinary manifestations of human gregariousness, formulat-

ing a more complex account of social feeling as an inherent capacity of individuals. In

fact, the interest in social feeling emerged in the space between the new psychology and

an emergent sociology, and was oriented by a utopian aim. The cultivation of social feel-

ing was designed to equip individuals with an expansive emotional landscape that took

them beyond those alignments oriented by the personal and familiar – upon which famil-

ial and nationalist sentiments rested – towards human sympathies, feelings of fellowship

and universal brotherhood, understanding and peace.

The emergence of the ‘herd instinct’

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who first used the concept of the herd instinct to highlight the

negative influence of social constraints on individual freedom in The Gay Science, pub-

lished in 1882, arguing that the state maintains its power over individuals through a

Judeo-Christian moral code that represses natural instincts oriented towards individual

expressiveness (Nietzsche, 2001[1882]: 114–20, 131, 211–14). The state embodies the

herd, and reduces individuals to a function within the whole; the herd instinct is used

to account both for individual conformity and for the removal of individual agency by

the machinery of the state. Individuals who rebel against the moral code imposed on

them are classified by the state as criminals but from Nietzche’s standpoint become

moral heroes by their assumption of individual responsibility and refusal of herd

mediocrity.3

The Nietzschean model of the herd gained influence among Fabian intellectuals in

Britain at the beginning of the 20th century, as they drew on his arguments to argue for

a form of spiritual freedom that could lead to transcendent fellowship (see Harrison,

1915). The reading of actions driven by the herd instinct as indicative of a failure of indi-

vidual responsibility was reinforced by the British eugenicist Francis Galton in 1883.

Galton proposed that ‘gregariousness’ in animals and humans had a ‘slavish’ quality

involving submission to a leader, linking it to not only a defect of self-reliance and public

responsibility, but also the absence of ‘ordinary social desires’ and affection for others

(Galton, 2001[1883]). Galton was the key reference point for the consideration of the

herd instinct in the natural sciences at the beginning of the 20th century in Britain, though

the influential psychologist William McDougall reversed Galton’s view of gregarious-

ness as a defective, atavistic disposition and used it instead as a support for the social

sentiments, seen as the basis of social cooperation (McDougall, 1928[1908]: 72).4

McDougall’s model pointed to gregariousness as the psychological mechanism underly-

ing an instinctual tendency towards association, leading in turn to a form of psychology

that addressed the emotional dispositions of collective life. Although McDougall

claimed his more elaborate study of group feeling was substantially complete in 1909,

it did not appear until 1920 (McDougall, 1920).5

In the meantime, a new approach to the herd instinct, formed in the intersection of

psychology and sociology, was popularized. Developed by Wilfred Trotter, later a pro-

minent surgeon, but at this time an anatomy demonstrator at University College London,

this model directly contested the fracture between the herd instinct and social feeling and

the implication that the influence of the herd subjugated individual agency. Trotter,

Swanson 23




along with others from a range of disciplines investigating the psychological foundations

of social behaviour at this time – whose interests, the psychoanalyst Edward Glover later

commented, were in ‘cultural matters’ and who were concerned to devise a ‘cultural

approach’ to human behaviour that diverged from both Viennese and US approaches

(Glover, cited in Cameron and Forrester, 2000: 190)6 – had discovered the work of

Freud. In fact Trotter drew Freud’s writing to the attention of his future brother-in-

law Ernest Jones, who subsequently became the most significant figure in the emergent

psychoanalytic movement in pre-war Britain and a vigorous proponent of Freud’s ideas

over the next decades. Trotter and Jones went to the First International Psycho-

Analytical Congress in Salzburg together in 1908 and Trotter also became a founder

member of the London Society of Psychoanalysts, which Jones established in 1913

(Holdstock, 1984: vii–ix; Van Ginneken, 2007: 69–70, 84). Trotter remained supportive

of Freud, nominating him to the Royal Society, helping to secure asylum in Britain for

him and acting as a consultant during his terminal illness in the 1930s (Van Ginneken,

2007: 69).

But Trotter’s interests were formed across a wider canvas: he was (as was William

McDougall) a member of the Sociological Society and was also influenced by a distinc-

tive and eclectic school of British psychology which was characterized by a rejection of

Freud’s focus on the sexual instinct as the primary foundation of human relations and

action, and critical of his failure to account for collective behaviour.7 Challenging

Freud’s opposition between individual drives, which were pursued in competition with

others, and the forces of social prohibition, which worked against the aggressive and

destructive actions deriving from primitive aims, Trotter claimed instead that actions

directed to the preservation of the group also derived from an instinct. Trotter first pre-

sented his theory of the herd instinct in a lecture to the society in 1905 and his first essay

was published in the inaugural volume of its journal the Sociological Review in 1908,

reflecting its pertinence to the society’s interests in gregariousness as the foundation

of social life (Trotter, 1908; Van Ginneken, 2007: 55, 64–50). This and his second arti-

cle, published in the next volume the following year, were so influential that they were

republished in book form with an additional essay in 1915 and again with a further post-

script in 1919 (Trotter, 1909; Trotter, 1919).8 Trotter’s analysis provided a template for

contemporary uses of the herd instinct as a term.

Trotter’s innovation was to use the concept of the herd as a metaphor for associated

life, and to link it to biological models of instinct being introduced into accounts of

human behaviour in the early 20th century. Instinct theory was a critical manoeuvre in

the positioning of psychology as a scientific, rather than speculative, discipline in this

period, and one of the means by which sociology also began to claim its identity as a

discipline in its own right was through a dialogue with psychology (see Thomson,

2006: 66).9 The Sociological Society offered a key platform for this process of disciplin-

ary convergence and positioning.10 Sociological Review’s editor, L. T. Hobhouse, pro-

moted the importance of social theory alongside the practical questions of social

policy and administration that had been the focus of Patrick Geddes’ initial investment

in the society, and from its appearance in 1908 it established an eclectic approach to

social experience and human behaviour. As Chris Renwick demonstrates in his impor-

tant account of the intellectual history of sociology as a discipline and the contribution





of British theoretical debates to its foundation, the society was riven by different visions of

what sociology should be. Renwick’s argument is that as L. T. Hobhouse gained promi-

nence in the institutionalization of sociology – displacing Francis Galton and Patrick

Geddes – the discipline became separated from its biological origins and defined against

the natural sciences (Renwick, 2012). However, though Renwick makes clear his opposi-

tion to a biological model of inheritance as the basis of human character, Hobhouse impli-

citly drew on a biologically founded model of evolution through the psychological

underpinning of his dynamic approach to human purpose and agency. Biological and

sociological accounts were both transformed by energetic models drawn from physics and

chemistry in this period (see Anker, 2001), as were those contemporary forms of collective

psychology that drew on biological models of instinct.11 In this respect, Hobhouse’s

appointment as the first chair of Sociology at the LSE did not so much presage the end

of a biologically inflected sociology, but an integration of accounts of human behaviour

and social change devised within natural and social scientific models. As he put it: ‘Sociol-

ogy . . . is the attempt to correlate . . . the psychological and biological conditions of

human society’ (cited in Harley, 2012: 416).12 Hobhouse’s editorial to the first issue of

Sociological Review stressed the artificial division between nature and society and asserted

the need for a scientific sociology that would address ‘the nature and conditions of the

social structure and the observable laws of its growth and decay’ but also one which would

incorporate political philosophy, to identify social ideals and the means of their realization

(Hobhouse, 1908: 3–6). Hobhouse’s earlier argument for the evolutionary coincidence of

intelligence and gregariousness also informed the society’s interests, and was taken up by

his pupil Karl Pearson and elaborated by Trotter. As we will see, attending to the way

social dynamics were shaped by the organic and subjective life of the individual was part

of a concerted address to the ‘science of life’ used to elaborate a psycho-physical model of

collective behaviour in early 20th-century Britain (see also Swanson, 2013). Trotter’s work

can be seen to embody this alliance.

While a psychologically informed sociology was prevalent in these debates, it is evi-

dent that the pervasiveness of instinct theory in explanations of human behaviour in this

period was the result of a more general permeability of disciplinary boundaries. Models

of social change in early 20th-century Britain were developed across a more extensive set

of interdisciplinary networks connecting research into the social and human sciences,

which drew on the proximity of evolutionary biology, psychology and anthropology

in British social thinking at this time (Den Otter, 1996: 212; Van Ginneken, 2007:

62–3). Rather than being stimulated by the ‘unprecedented collective trauma’ of the First

World War (Richards, 2000: 187), the attention to collective psychology emerged from a

confluence of disciplinary shifts and social and political interests which framed the ques-

tion of social futures in terms of the biological and emotional basis of ‘group life’ and the

mechanisms of calibrating individual fulfilment and social progress.13 These exchanges

and cross-fertilizations provide the context for Trotter’s development of the concept of a

fourth instinct to account for human association, alongside the individual instincts of

nutrition, self-preservation and sex.

Trotter is most commonly remembered now for his later comments on the different

forms of character discernible in wartime Germany and Britain – which he came to

regret, and which certainly distracted from his more general aim. But it was his first two

Swanson 25




articles that had the greatest contemporary impact in sociological and related intellec-

tual circles. These presented the case for an inherent fear of loneliness and a drive

towards companionship as much as they did for the influence of the herd on individual

action. Trotter promoted ‘sensitiveness’ to the interests of others as the basis of a social

good – altruism – alongside an argument that human fulfilment was realizable only

through association.14

Trotter’s model of the herd instinct, and its role in human interaction, culture and

social change, highlights a significant moment in the development of sociological think-

ing prior to the Great War, challenging Social Darwinist models of fitness with its nar-

rative of human fulfilment. His 1919 postscript identified the need for a scientific

approach to social planning that would foster, rather than stultify, human variability and

innovation, situating his arguments within a tradition of political argument oriented to

calibrating social reform to ‘human nature’ as elucidated by psychology, rather than eco-

nomic and social structures. The British context was hospitable to this alignment: his

concept soon became so thoroughly diffused into social thinking in early 20th-century

Britain that within a few years its origination was frequently not even referenced.15

Trotter’s argument provided an important component of associational thinking prevalent

in British psychology and sociology in this period, and which challenged both Social

Darwinist models of human progress and the Freudian model whereby primitive drives

were modified by social prohibitions.

Given the widespread take-up of Trotter’s work in this period, it is puzzling that the

herd instinct as a positive term in the understanding of collective life has become almost

completely obscured, and that – if he is mentioned at all – its originator, Trotter, is char-

acterized as socially conservative. This misunderstanding is as characteristic of current

social sciences and humanities scholarship as of social commentary and popular use (see

below; for exceptions see Mandler, 2006; Thomson, 2006; Holdstock, 1984; Greisman,

1979; Mayhew, 2006: 31, n. 7; and especially Van Ginneken, 2007, the only sustained

analysis of the formation and influence of Trotter’s model). This is partly due to the

attention given to crowd theory as a way of encapsulating contemporary concerns over

the management of urban populations, which overstresses its prevalence in British psy-

chological thinking in this period and eclipses a more complex, socially nuanced and

politically hybrid set of debates concerning the psychology of social feeling, culture and

group life.16 To rectify these misreadings I will examine the conflations and misalign-

ments which have followed Trotter’s framing of associational life in terms of the ‘herd’

and his invocation of ‘instinct’, and draw out the conceptual threads that lead him to use

these as the basis of an expansive, future-oriented, political vision of human association.

Crowd theory, the mass mind and instinct: Misalignmentsand conflations

An important dimension to the consideration of Trotter’s work – and the British school of

social psychology which is oriented to the positive dimensions of group feeling and cul-

tural life – is that it allows us to disturb an account of collective psychology that has been

narrated as a passage between Gustave Le Bon’s treatise, published in 1896, on the

crowd as the emblem of the ‘popular mind’ (2005[1896]), and Freud’s Group





Psychology and the Ego, published in 1922, both of which assume that irrational and,

importantly, destructive urges of the individual are the prime motivators of social action.

This is exemplified by Serge Moscovici, who attempts to situate Le Bon as the ‘father’ of

collective psychology (accepting Le Bon’s claims, which do not acknowledge his pre-

cursors) and more recently by William Mazzarella who sees all group psychologists

as forerunners of a Freudian synthesis ‘creeping up on Freud’s melancholy diagnosis

of the pathology of civilization’ (Moscovici, 1985; Mazzarella, 2010: 704). Van Ginne-

ken asserts the distinctive orientation of the ‘Anglo-Saxon School’ but sees the main

impact of Trotter’s model in terms of his influence on Freud’s development of the con-

cepts of identification and the superego (2007: 69, 84). Anthony Elliott’s (2000) claim

that psychoanalysis is the field of knowledge that addresses ‘the human element’ in mod-

ern social life and transformation, overlooks alternative models of psychology with

greater influence on the way such questions have been addressed historically, in favour

of those that fit with models favoured by contemporary social theory, situating the ‘Freu-

dian debt’ in terms of the ability of psychoanalysis to account for destructive human

forces. It is conventional to disregard the influence of British social psychology in the

early decades of the 20th century, and to regard it as inherently determinist as a result

of its integration of biological models, in contrast to sociology which is seen as more

successfully oriented towards ‘social concern’. But this ignores the integration of psy-

chological models into sociology in this period, regarding sociology proper as beginning

in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g. Roiser, 1991: 169–87). These accounts overlook the differ-

ent trajectory of British psychology and sociology and their influence on social thinking

as well as the more marginal influence of psychoanalysis in Britain and its culturalist

orientation.

Readings of Trotter’s work have been particularly fuelled by a tendency to align the

herd instinct with the assumed originator of a negative view of the crowd in cultural life

(Mazzarella, 2010: 704). Le Bon saw crowd behaviour as evidence of a flaw running

through the fabric of social cohesion, an archaism – irrational, primitive and animalistic –

prevalent in certain social groups, which sat at odds with the disciplined comportment that

expressed achieved civilized values.17 Historiographical comment on the crowd in the 18th

and 19th centuries had certainly anticipated this association with public order, disturbance

and criminality, and Le Bon has been seen as a popularizer of such characterizations, refi-

guring them as psychological traits (Harrison, 1988: 6–8).18 In this regard, he attributed to

crowds gullibility, impulsiveness and emotional volatility: the sense of ‘invincible power’

offered by the scale of the crowd, he argued, had a ‘hypnotic’ effect on the individual whose

loss of will and discernment reduced that individual to destructive barbarism and dictatorial

manipulation.19

But though commonly referred to as a ‘crowd psychologist’ and associated with Le

Bon (Soffer, 1978: 222; Gay, 1988: 184; LeMahieu, 1988; Crook, 1994; Bourke,

2005: 65, 224–5; Rogers, 1998; Villis, 2006: 209), Trotter did not concern himself with

the crowd and he dismissed the significance of Le Bon’s ‘little book’ in a footnote, not-

ing that Le Bon formulated ‘many generalizations’.20 Trotter discussed the work of only

one (pro-democratic) crowd theorist, Boris Sidis, in order to counter his view of sugges-

tion as a social evil, and the crowd hardly gets a mention again.21 In fact, Trotter took

care to distinguish his notion of the herd instinct from the analysis of crowd behaviour

Swanson 27




(Greisman, 1979: 357). First, he looked beyond the characteristics of ‘assemblies of per-

sons being and acting in association’ (actual crowds) to a more general understanding of

gregariousness as a mentality and its effects on ‘the structure of [the] mind’ (Trotter,

1919: 23–6). Crowds were exceptions: fortuitous, temporary and physical aggregations

of individuals motivated by common impulses and emotions (ibid.: 28, 42, 115; see also

Tansley, 1920: 231). Trotter was concerned with association as part of the normal every-

day functioning of social life, and he shifted the ground to a study of the human organism

as an associated being. This included the psychological processes evident in individual

behaviour: ‘since man as a solitary animal is unknown to us . . . every individual must

present the characteristics of the social animal’ (Trotter, 1919: 11–12). Second, he exam-

ined the associative processes of the normal mind in order to provide a general theory of

their operation at an unconscious level, as opposed to an account of pathological

instances (ibid.: 26). This led to his third departure from crowd psychology, which was

to propose that unconscious processes were complementary, rather than threatening, to

conscious functioning in the normal mind, undermining any negative appraisal of uncon-

scious processes and their role in governing human behaviour (ibid.: 76).

The precision with which Trotter distinguished his concept of the herd instinct from

the evaluations of Le Bon and other crowd psychologists has not prevented his being

associated with them in the historiography of approaches to the ‘mass mind’.22 When

Daniel LeMahieu discusses the influence of social psychology (and particularly Trotter)

on the distrust of the general public, he does so by aligning it with the manoeuvre used by

Le Bon: to present crowd behaviour in language that dehumanizes the people. He then

associates that manoeuvre with a lack of individuality and a negative reading of the

crowd’s uniformity of behaviour: ‘If the crowd behaved like animals or children,

it . . . lacked individuality and personal distinctiveness. Members of the general public

acted all alike or, as Trotter put it ‘‘the cardinal quality of the herd is homogeneity’’’

(LeMahieu, 1988: 108). There are several erroneous assumptions rolled into this way

of situating Trotter’s perspective. First, he did not align the crowd with animals or chil-

dren: he saw the emergence of instinctive feeling in adolescence as part of the transition

from childhood to maturity, especially in the conflict between egoistic impulses and herd

suggestion (Trotter, 1919: 50). Second, Trotter did not see collectivity as a condition of

dehumanization: rather, as Mathew Thomson indicates, he argued that the individual was

essentially social and that it was dehumanizing to view individual psychological capa-

cities in isolation (Thomson, 2006: 71). Third, Trotter’s view of the herd instinct did not

imply lack of individuality – in fact he associated it with innovation and variation, seeing

these as essential components of human adaptation and cultural development. There was

no sense in which his concept of homogeneity (which as I will show he uses to refer to a

common aim, not uniformity of thought or behaviour) was a negative comment on exist-

ing or actual publics. It was, in contrast, an ideal concerning the direction of human prog-

ress, positioned alongside others such as differentiation, specialization and human

fulfilment. Finally, there is no justification to attribute to him a ‘perceived lack of differ-

entiation’ in the general public (LeMahieu, 1988: 108). Trotter’s framing of collective

behaviour did not deploy a notion of the mass, and he created a typology of different

kinds of mind that supported the derogation not of the people, but of elites. If he consid-

ered the possibility that the public could be influenced adversely it was not because





members of that public lacked maturity and individuality and were unable to exert selec-

tive judgement, but because of a class system which allowed the resistive minds of the

governing elite to control the direction of society. In fact, in contrast to his view of the

deficiencies of elites, in a piece written just before he died Trotter notes the ‘courageous

endurance’ and resistance to panic of the ‘common people’ during the Second World

War, whom he praises as the ‘moral backbone’ of the country (1940: 270).

The prominence of LeMahieu’s account, and the patchiness of the literature on British

social psychology in favour of the US version, have helped an account of Trotter that ties

him to Le Bon to become generalized. Elsewhere it has led Trotter – and even more sig-

nificantly William McDougall, its foremost proponent – to become overlooked in

accounts of the genesis of social psychology as a discipline (for example, Helen

McCarthy, referencing LeMahieu, names William James, Gustav Le Bon and Graham

Wallas as its pioneers before 1914; see McCarthy, 2011: 122).

Given the prominence of Le Bon in the historiography it might seem strange that

Trotter dealt with him so briefly, but Le Bon did not discuss a ‘herd instinct’ and his

analysis of the crowd had little influence in Britain, seeming to speak to the French

context, and seen as too dependent on mob violence to have wider application to group

life (Mandler, 2006: 156).23 Schnapp and Tiews situate Trotter within an Anglo-Saxon

sociological tradition of analysing ‘collective activity’, differentiating him from Le

Bon’s interest in ‘crowd menace’ (Schnapp and Tiews, 2006: xiii), though they suggest

this was inspired by the Great War, rather than preceding and becoming inflected by

it, and their ‘retrieval’ of Trotter elides his very particular use of evolutionary biology,

contributing to the early 20th-century retrieval of Darwin’s emphasis on sympathy,

cooperation and the evolutionary function of the social and moral instincts. Van Ginneken

argues that this divergence from continental attitudes was fostered by the currency of

arguments that mass societies actually enhanced the social instincts, linked to a refor-

mist impulse deriving from New Liberalism and the ethical societies (Trotter was a

committee member of the Cambridge Ethical Society) which centred on a call for inter-

ventionist government policies oriented towards a series of melioristic measures to

address changing relations of empire, economic inequality and the political impact

of the Reform Acts (2007: 55–9). In fact, Harvey Greisman notes that Trotter’s book

‘was among the first works to treat human groups as biological phenomena without

incorporating the ideas of the ‘‘group mind’’ theorists like Gustave Le Bon’ (Greisman,

1979: 357; emphasis added).24

In contrast to Le Bon, then, Trotter drew on a cultural tradition in which collective life

was seen as the context for human flourishing.25 That sensitivity to the group that con-

stituted a distinctive feature of the gregarious animal became translated in humans into a

gregarious sensibility that allowed individuals to develop the capacity of altruism, which

Trotter saw as the foremost demonstration of the realization of human potential. In fact,

his study of the way that the instincts of human sociability manifested themselves in

British society led Trotter to conclude that what was most regressive in British social life

was not only the repressive nature of the class structure for those on whose labour the

nation’s future depended, but the rigidity of thinking, resistance to innovation and –

above all – the failure of altruism which characterized the intellectual and emotional

make-up of the elite cadre of leaders who blocked change. This, he claimed, was the

Swanson 29




greatest and most shameful impediment to human progress. Compared with this

entrenched erosion of human potential, crowd behaviour was simply an anomalous and

temporary ‘event’, brought about by contingent circumstances: psychological analysis of

it could offer no general insights for managing social collectivities.

Trotter’s turn to instinct theory was a strategy for elaborating an inherent capacity for

human association, which manifested in variable ways according to the influence of

environmental conditions on its development. The nuances of such an approach to

instinct and evolution are overlooked by historical accounts which present instinct theory

as necessarily bound up with biological determinism and an evolutionary approach that

is used to promote conservative (and imperial) values and condemn the primitivism of

the popular (or working-class) mind. This erroneous reading of Trotter and his associates

becomes integrated into sociological and culturalist approaches from the 1970s, acting as

a ‘presentist’ ruse for a defence of social constructionism. Reba Soffer’s 1978 treatment,

for example, argues that he was an ‘elitist’ who doubted the good intentions of all but a

rational few and used biological models of evolution to derogate the ‘instinctual and

incompetent crowd’ and the fundamental mindlessness of the great majority, seeing

equality and liberty as incompatible with human nature and its instinctual crowd propen-

sity, and fearing that ‘mass urban democracy would obliterate moral distinctions’ (Sof-

fer, 1978: 2–4, 217 ff., 228). Her account informs influential commentators such as

Robert Nye, who as a result incorrectly suggests Trotter drew on Le Bon to argue for the

need for trained social elites to ‘cope with modern crowd phenomena’ (Nye, 1975: 168).

Soffer’s reading fails to acknowledge Trotter’s view that group life was the only con-

text in which individuals could be fully realized, thereby misrepresenting his political

radicalism. Ernest Jones described Trotter as an ‘extreme and bloodthirsty revolution-

ary’, adding that he looked to psychology for a model of the ideal democratic subject,

‘one whose democratic character rested, both in a freedom of instinctive spirit, and in

the channelling of energies thereby released in responsible and sympathetic harmony with

fellow citizens: the latter making the former possible’ (Thomson, 2006: 213–14).26 Along

with her assumption that a biological model of behaviour is necessarily employed to iden-

tify defect, Soffer’s misreading of Trotter follows from her situating of all writers who call

upon models of instinct within a negative counter-swell to the heroic burgeoning of a beha-

viourally oriented social science.

Even those who recognize Trotter’s pacifist and ‘egalitarian’ motives interpret the use

of instinct in his work to imply that he saw the herd as the source of a destructive irra-

tionality. Paul Crook, for example, includes him in a discussion of ‘the killing crowd’, as

an ‘instinctivist with ‘‘fighting beast’’ ideas’. Crook associates instinct with conflict, and

understands the capacity for cooperation to derive from social influences, so cannot

reconcile Trotter’s recognition of both aggressiveness and positive social feeling as

human capacities: after all, Trotter is attempting to show that cooperation also has a

foundation in instinct.27 As a result of Trotter’s unequivocal statements in favour of

pacifism, and his rejection of the argument for the biological necessity of war, Crook

finally does place him in the ‘peace biology camp’, but still attributes to him an elitist

view that the ‘ferocious instincts of the masses [would be controlled] by the more intel-

ligent and moral leaders, or by the ‘‘better classes’’’ (Crook, 1994: 152).28 Such a char-

acterization flies in the face of Trotter’s extremely critical evaluation of the governing





elites but it also overlooks his general concern with a non-hierarchical ecology of human

association as a unified collection of ‘fellows’.29

Biological models and the social instinct

What these negative evaluations of instinct theory in early 20th-century psychology over-

look is that it had its origin in the rejection of idealist models of human conduct against

which a pathological view of the animalistic crowd or ‘fighting beast’ was drawn. In this

respect, instinct theory allowed a rejection not only of the nihilism of Nietszchean phi-

losophy, but the metaphysical model of mind adopted by earlier psychology, and the

rational ‘pleasure-seeking’ model of individual motivation of 19th-century materialism.

Instinct theory, in contrast, offered the opportunity to study the human as an evolved ani-

mal and, according to revisionist biological models developed in the early 20th century,

situated as much in a relationship to environmental influences as to heredity. Analogies

with other species were made through the observation of animal and plant behaviour, and

human societies became situated by the study of ‘life’ and social change understood in

terms of a processual model.30 The role of instincts in the mental life of individuals was

adopted almost universally in psychologically informed studies of society, allowing an

understanding of group behaviour as a predictable entity, with an internal consistency,

whose differentiation across social and national contexts was the result of the influence

of environmental factors on the formation of individual character, as well as of social

convention.

It was the statistician and socialist eugenicist Karl Pearson’s identification of the

social instincts and their affective dimension, love and sympathy – originally derived

from Herbert Spencer – which Trotter explicitly acknowledged as the foundation of his

concept of the herd instinct. But Trotter used this to challenge, rather than uphold,

Pearson’s hierarchical approach to social progress, basing his model on the need for

variability rather than the elimination of the unfit. Pearson had studied with Francis

Galton and at this time was teaching biometrics at University College London (Anker,

2001: 89) but he revises Galton’s negative assessment of herd mentality in the context

of a processual model of instinct.31 Pearson argued that ‘the safety of a gregarious ani-

mal – and man is essentially such, depends upon the intensity with which the social

instinct has been developed’. Human sympathy and love were the result of the commu-

nity’s struggle for survival, whereby they became a social unit, ‘the herd’ (Pearson,

1905[1901]: 49). In effect, Trotter adapted Pearson’s concept of the social instinct

to the unit that it was designed to sustain.32

Pearson had highlighted the herd as the basis and product of social evolution, with

gregariousness working towards the survival of the collective herd rather than to support

the competition between individual species.33 But he also saw human heredity working

through a linear model of evolutionary progress – towards a higher racial and social

‘type’ – and so promoted the process of natural selection as a means by which inferior

types would be eliminated in the interests of national or human fitness. The psychologi-

cal dimension of Trotter’s model of the herd instinct, and his distinctive approach to var-

iation and innovation as products of human intelligence, provided an important break

with Social Darwinist models, allowing him to shed the hierarchical model of human

Swanson 31




typologies upon which Pearson’s argument depends. By contrast, Trotter saw what Pear-

son viewed as lack of fitness – a stable characteristic – as the changeable outcome of

class privilege. This invalidated Pearson’s hierarchical model of social value and

his conception of national efficiency based on racial selection.34 Rather than intra-

species competition, Trotter’s model foregrounded the psychological dimension of evo-

lutionary processes, highlighting variability as a factor in the survival of the human as a

species, through its contribution to adaptation.

As he aligned his interest in social feeling with a biological model of evolution, Trot-

ter proposed a continuity between patterns of human association in gregarious animals

and humans. In this regard, he particularly emphasized the increase in complexity – the

multicellular organism developing from the unicellular and, by analogy, the transition

from a solitary existence to the social. This functioned as a form of ‘advantageous ela-

boration’, allowing variation to occur in the safety of an enlarged and multiple ‘compet-

ing unit’ (human society) and so reducing the solitary unit’s exposure to the hazards of

natural selection. Unfit cells or groups of cells could be eliminated within a multicellular

organism, and this complex unit would continue to exist in an adapted form, whereas

natural selection put the unicellular organism at risk of extinction. Once the limits of

physical elaboration were reached, further complexity, or enlargement of the competing

unit, could be achieved only through the introduction of the ‘social habit’, which allowed

individual organisms to survive in communities when they would not be capable of

existing separately. This modified the action of natural selection, allowing for patterns

of variation which, though they might be unfavourable to individual survival, were

advantageous to that of the community (Trotter, 1919: 18–24).35 In this context, varia-

tion becomes a matter of ongoing mutual adjustment to the environmental influences of

habitat, and so gives rise to a culturally variable model of human association.

Drawing on developments in botanical and zoological sciences which were oriented

by the study of processes of adaptation and variation, then, Trotter examined processes

of development which were motivated by organic responses to environmental influ-

ences. He was, in other words, concerned with the evolution and survival of the human

species per se, in its variability, rather than an evolutionary model which drew on a

racial typology to promote progress towards human perfection. This is a striking dif-

ference to Pearson’s dual model of survival and competition as an aspect of human

progress and national improvement. Pearson used this to justify a ‘a great civilization

supplanting a lower race unable to work to the full the land and its resources’, offering

a rationale for colonial domination on the basis of the survival of the fittest (his exam-

ple was Australia) alongside a view that racial homogeneity was the basis of national

stability and survival (Pearson, 1905[1901]: 25–6). There is no trace of this hierarch-

ical model of evolution in Trotter’s writing though: he acknowledged selection, but

promoted the defensive and integrative processes of gregariousness in human societies

as a way of fostering individual variation rather than those based on aggression, or

competition (in fact, this was the basis of his valuation of British social character over

that of Germany, in his wartime essay). What this allows Trotter to do, is to supplant

the hierarchies of Social Darwinism with a horizontal model of variability and

integration as the basis of evolutionary adaptation. Associational life is figured not

as a chaotic and lawless crowd existing at the bottom of the scale of social behaviour,





but as a dispersed network of contingent exchanges, relationships and cultural encoun-

ters which constitute an ecology of the social organism.

Situated in this context, it becomes clear that Trotter’s theory offered a conceptual

framework with which to formulate and understand the mechanisms of social belonging

and group feeling, addressing the relation of the individual and the collective, the influ-

ence of cultural factors on the individual and the role of the individual mind in guiding

human action in such contexts. In contrast to its current meaning, then, the herd instinct

was defined as a component of normal psychological functioning and ordinary associa-

tion: as a concept it was devised as part of a concerted move to provide a future-oriented

narrative of human potential.36

Suggestion, innovation and altruism: Culture and humanpotential

The primary capacity to which the herd instinct gave rise in Trotter’s model, was sensi-

tiveness to the interests of the herd of which the animal was a part – a specialized form of

responsiveness to the conditions of collectivity. But Trotter’s account of the herd instinct

in humans also foregrounded a distinctive and evolved characteristic: the growth of intel-

ligence. This is evident in his approach to suggestion, which he situated as an aspect of

sensitiveness and the foundation of innovation rather than as mere imitation or a ‘con-

tagion’ of ideas.37 Human impulses thereby became modified by influences deriving

from external sources. While the herd instinct drove individuals to act according to the

homogeneous aim of the survival of the group, the forms this took at an individual level

were heterogeneous, as ‘suggestion’ was modified by human intelligence. Within such a

configuration, human evolution became a cultural rather than simply a genetic process

(Holdstock, 1984: xi), allowing for creative variation and individual expressiveness. Not

only did the influence of culture on instinctive impulses give rise to a range of different

behavioural outcomes, including symbolic activity, but they could be expressed in cul-

turally variable ways.38 This is what distinguished Trotter’s model of association from

those accounts of mass society operating through a process of direct transmission. To

be sensitive to the voice of the herd, the individual must have an ‘infallible capacity for

recognizing his fellow-members’ and to act in ways that favoured the individual’s sur-

vival as the member of that collective rather than as a solitary being. But this did not

entail uniformity of response (or even collective responses): rather, it implied that an

individual’s actions bore the ‘stamp of being regulated by the existence and influence

of his fellows’ as an aspect of the influence of both culture and human instinct (Trotter,

1919: 99).

Here, Trotter opened up to sociological study an intricate realm of the relation of

instinct and individual creativity (or intelligence), the pressure and experience of collec-

tivity on human behaviour, and the role of suggestion in motivating action in support of a

unit of association.39 One outcome of mobilizing a model of association based in instinct

and linking this to the influence of suggestion was to refute a materialist model of social

life and human action based on an individual seen as ‘fundamentally always indepen-

dent, responsible, and captain of his soul’ (Trotter, 1919: 93). Trotter’s account of the

influence of the herd represented an encounter between instinct and reason, individual

Swanson 33




and collective, as opposed to seeing them as conflicting forces. This creative engagement

with suggestion also distinguished his account from those of the crowd: to propose that

conscious and unconscious processes are interactive and complementary was to chal-

lenge the understanding of suggestion as antipathetic to normal functioning and individ-

ual self-determination.40

While Trotter agreed that suggestibility worked through an unconscious instinctual dis-

position towards gregariousness, he refused its devaluation. If unconscious processes were

seen as complementary to conscious ones, suggestibility – and hence gregariousness – was

not opposed to the functioning of the conscious mind, not based in a ‘cleavage of the

mind’, but ‘a necessary quality of every normal mind, continually present, and an inalien-

able accompaniment of human thought’ (1919: 28). The herd as a psychological complex,

then, existed as ‘a permanent and fundamental constituent of the human mind and of

human life’ – one which exerted influence whether others were actually present or not –

and related to a condition of feeling based in belonging, or fellowship (see Tansley, 1920:

232). As the focus on ‘associated man’ shifted the locus of interest from the activity of

crowds as pathological instances to the normal, associated human organism, suggestibility

became resituated as part of the creative economy of gregariousness as the key to human

life.

Suggestibility, then, was both a variable and an ordinary component of human gregar-

iousness, ‘the same instinct which makes social life at all possible’ (Trotter, 1919: 45), a

quality of the normal mind rather than a defect of character:

Man is not . . . suggestible by fits and starts, not merely in panics and in mobs, under hypno-

sis, and so forth, but always, everywhere, and under any circumstances. (Trotter, 1919: 33)

As a factor in the prompting of individual action – mental or physical – suggestibility

was distinguished only by the fact that the source of its origination lay outside the self.

In his claim that it pervaded the whole landscape of everyday associational life, Trotter

effectively posited suggestion as a factor that played through the indivisible body of the

collective organism.

Ascribing herd suggestion with an instinctual character was critical in Trotter’s

attempt to account for its influence, then. His concept of ‘sensitiveness’ not only pro-

vided the framework for a distinctive model of cultural attunement that infused British

social (or ‘applied’) psychology at this time, and provided the basis for its resistance to

the Freudian emphasis on aggression as the by-product and driver of individual aims. It

also constituted a major reconfiguring of individual psychology: what lay beyond the self

was not radically split from the self, but a continuation of self:

The individual knows another individual of the same herd as . . . in some way and to a cer-

tain extent identical with himself and part of his own personality. He is able to feel with the

other and share his pleasures and sufferings as if they were an attenuated form of his own

personal experiences. (Trotter, 1919: 122; emphases added)

The identification of a fourth ‘herd instinct’ thus extended the narrative of individual

motives to an instinct that exceeded the pressure of externally directed individual aims





and implied the examination of a different set of complexes, relating to the most basic

mental features of gregariousness:

. . . an unanalysable primary sense of comfort in the actual presence of his fellows and a

similar sense of discomfort in their absence. It will be obvious truth to him that it is not good

for the man to be alone. Loneliness will be a real terror, insurmountable by reason. (Trotter,

1919: 31)

This was the axiomatic truth of instinct: an irreducible relation between sensation and

action unamenable to modification by rational thought (1919: 15).41 ‘Higher’ derivations

of the identification with the human herd included the adoption of opinions and conduct

that are supported by a ‘herd within a herd’, or social classes, leading to ‘an unanalysable

dislike of the novel in action or thought’ that manifests as convention. But as derivations,

these were formed in a secondary process, subject to external influences. It was the drive

to associate with others – their presence – that formed the baseline of instinct, in

all these derivations. Suggestion fell upon that ground. It was the herd which was there-

fore pre-eminent in human suggestibility: suggestions embodying the voice of the herd

were found acceptable, while the individual may remain impervious to suggestions aris-

ing from experience, or outside the herd (ibid.: 32–3). Structurally then, gregariousness,

the instinct of the herd, was the impulse – not suggestibility.

Sensitiveness to the presence of fellows and the terror of loneliness therefore pre-

ceded and provided the conditions for suggestion in the economy of the herd.42 In Trot-

ter’s account, the instinct was a way of focusing on human ‘life’ in the same way as we

might in a plant or a cell: representing the forms of energy by which it exists. This focus

permeated the natural sciences in this period, with botanical study identifying a ‘life’

force in the tendency to seek a state of equilibrium in patterns of plant growth, for exam-

ple (Anker, 2001: 31). It was this tendency that allowed it to adapt to external conditions

and so brought about an interaction between the organism (formed through patterns of

heredity) and its habitat (manifested in patterns of adaptation), offering a dynamic model

of repetition and variation shaped by an encounter with environmental conditions. This

analogy between energies influencing plant growth and those motivating human beha-

viour was widely accepted, and embodied in instinct theory. The analogous use of the

law of equilibrium, adapted to biological processes from physical and chemical laws

of energy, was common in the period when Trotter was writing, and was also used to

explain economic processes as well as social forces and human behaviour.43 But Peder

Anker also indicates that in a reciprocal movement, ‘the major source of inspiration for

formulating a mechanistic biology based on matter and energy was clinical psychology’

(ibid.: 101). Such exchanges and cross-influences reflect a transdisciplinary commitment

to, and nurturance of, a form of explanation that spanned the natural, social and human

sciences, informing the development of interdisciplinary models that acknowledged dif-

ferent dimensions of existence. In the case of the human organism this meant the form

this encounter took was not seen to derive from the social. Rather, for Trotter, an instinc-

tual – material – energy was part of the internal structure through which the organism

secured its existence, a ‘force of life’ that in the case of the human organism was directed

towards association. The herd instinct was devised to explain, then, the condition of the

Swanson 35




social, its pre-condition. It therefore allowed a more expansive context for situating the

human individual:

Man is thus not merely, as it were, rescued from the inhuman loneliness which he had been

taught was his destiny and persuaded was his pride, but he is relieved from perplexities and

temptations which had so long proved obstacles to his finding himself and setting out valiantly

on an upward path . . . If he but recognizes that he himself and his virtues and aspirations are

integral strands in the fabric of life, he will learn that the great tissue of reality loses none of its

splendour by the fact that near by where the pattern glows with his courage and pride it burns

with the radiance of the tiger, and over against his intellect and his genius it mocks in the gro-

tesques of the ape. (Trotter, 1919: 67–8)

The herd instinct pointed to a dimension of human existence and association that those

forms of social and cultural theory that ignore their biological dimensions (and the ‘phys-

ical’) find difficult to recognize. But it was accommodated within sociological thinking

at this time, before behaviouralism, Freudian psychoanalysis and other theories that

grounded psychic life in the friction between individual aim and social proscription came

to infuse public understanding of the mechanisms of human motivation and action. For

Trotter and instinct theorists, the ‘being-ness’ of the human and the origin and mainte-

nance of human ‘life’ as a material entity were critical to understanding both individual

and collective motivations, and so individual and group existence.

The social habit and the fourth instinct

If the herd instinct accounted for energies directed towards association, and suggestion

for the shaping of action directed to this end according to responses to externally deriv-

ing stimuli, what of the conflict between impulses oriented by collective or individual

aims? How did the herd instinct combat the force of the primary instinctual impulses

of individual self-preservation, nutrition and sex, to whose aims its own may be

opposed? This is the critical issue in Trotter’s refutation of the Freudian concept of

repression, the social proscription of the pursuit of instinctive aims. Trotter challenged

Freud’s opposition between drives and prohibitions, arguing that he gave a partial

account of the structure of the mind by failing to account properly for what Freud char-

acterized as the ‘repressing forces’ with which instinctive impulses conflict. Given that

they could take ‘the immensely powerful instinct of sex and mould and deform its pro-

digious mental energy – it is clear that the repressing forces are no less important than the

antagonist with which they contend’. So, how to account for their effectiveness? Trotter

proposed that environmental pressure would only obtain the power to succeed in thwart-

ing an instinctual impulse as forceful as sex by harnessing the psychic energy of another

instinctive mechanism (Trotter, 1919: 80–2). What Freud accounted for through a theory

of social prohibition, Trotter argued derived instead from a pre-social capacity: the force

of the associational impulse. The specific ‘sensitiveness’ of the gregarious mind to herd

opinion, therefore, was supported by the psychical energy of instinct. As a fourth

instinct, though, the herd instinct operated differently from other instincts – not in iso-

lation, but bearing upon the action of the others through the creation and resolution of





mental conflict. The primitive instincts of self-preservation, sex and nutrition, he

proposed:

. . . have in common the characteristic of attaining their maximal activities only over short

periods and in special sets of circumstances, and of being fundamentally pleasant to yield to.

They do not remain in action concurrently, but when the circumstances are appropriate for

the yielding to one, the others automatically fall into the background, and the governing

impulse is absolute master. (Trotter, 1919: 47)

Since these instincts did not conflict, the individual (though Trotter refers to ‘the animal’

in the human context also) did what pleases him ‘wholly unperplexed by doubt and

wholly secure in his unity of purpose’, giving him a sense of an unambivalent reality and

his own free will. The difference between these and the fourth herd instinct, then, was

that in the case of the latter, the impulse derived from an external source. So although

its influence was responded to instinctively, yielding to it may not be pleasurable, frac-

turing the ’smooth concurrence’ of instinct and individual desire. The herd instinct, then,

provided an alternative model of instinct as essentially conflicted, not just riven by a con-

flict wrought from the imposition of social proscription. Perhaps even more importantly,

not only were the primitive instincts ‘balked’ (or thwarted) by the exercise of the herd

instinct, but the outcomes of herd suggestion may in themselves be riven by conflict:

‘Not only sex, self-preservation, and nutrition are at war with the pronouncements of the

herd, but altruism, the ideal of rationality, the desire for power, the yearning for protec-

tion, and other feelings which have acquired instinctive force from group suggestion’

(Trotter, 1919: 50; emphases added). The influence of herd suggestion, then, disrupted

the sense of self-possession and reciprocity between object and need that was the result

of the ‘smooth confluence’ between the primary instincts and purposive action. This

introduced a field of experience and feeling which conflicted with primary instinctual

aims as a result of being potentized by the force of the herd instinct, through group

suggestion.

Although the alliance of the herd instinct and suggestion in Trotter’s account of asso-

ciation as motive dissolved the opposition between instinctual impulse and external con-

straint, it maintained conflict as the heart of human action. In fact, it intensified this by

integrating it into the instinctual make-up and functioning of the individual organism. For

now, the source of this conflict was the terror of loneliness and the ‘incompleteness’ of the

social animal that underlay gregariousness. This is the critical point at which Trotter’s dis-

cussion of the herd instinct became not a description of the biological origins and evolu-

tionary function of human gregariousness, or even an explanation of the psychological

basis of human association, but a narrative of human potential. If the modification of the

primary instincts by the herd instinct introduced variation, that sensitiveness which was the

distinctive capacity of gregariousness projected human purposes beyond individual sur-

vival towards a collective future, introducing a new temporality – of social change – to

associational life. This was the ambitious outcome of Trotter’s alignment of evolutionary

biology, instinctual psychology and a future-oriented sociology of human association.

The connection of the herd instinct with the suppression of individuality, in accounts

that see it as a support for crowd theory, does not, then, take into account Trotter’s

Swanson 37




bioculturalist – and future-oriented – reading of its influence. His model of instinctual

conflict lays considerable emphasis on individual variation in the way impulses were

translated into action. But an additional layer of variation was introduced through the

stress Trotter laid on the cultural variability of responses to the herd instinct (as well

as, by implication, to the primary instincts). This had its origin in the striving toward

association:

The individual of a gregarious species can never be truly independent or self-sufficient. Nat-

ural selection has ensured that as an individual he must have an abiding sense of incomple-

teness, which, as thought develops in complexity, will come to be more and more abstractly

expressed. (Trotter, 1919: 51)

This drive for completion through association provided a basis for religion; specula-

tively, further on, philosophy; elsewhere, speech; the aesthetic activities; and culture

generally (1919: 51, 23). It also underlay the attunement of action and thought to collec-

tive ends in the development of conscience, guilt and duty (ibid.: 40–1), working towards

the integration of individual units, and against disparate action and social fracture. If the

individual’s instinctual make-up was fundamentally conflictual, then, the cultural was

the product of that conflict. The culture of the herd, then, stood as a condition for indi-

vidual fulfilment.

Cultural history, conceptual particularity andintellectual lineages

The automatic and incorrect dismissal of instinctual models as essentially determinist

and therefore conservative arises, therefore, from the erroneous attribution of negative

accounts of mass society and the popular mind to works which if looked at in their par-

ticularity – especially an attention to the contemporary use of concepts – demonstrate a

socially progressive view of group life as the basis of individual fulfilment and the ‘foun-

dation of civilized life’ (Greisman, 1979: 360). Models of association circulating in Brit-

ain in this period emerged within a diverse field of vigorous social debate with its own

lineage and particularity, whose participants addressed questions of social cohesion and

cultural change through a specific set of preoccupations and approaches.

Trotter’s model of group behavior was internationally significant enough for Freud

to give it extended consideration, but Freud countered the idea of a ‘herd instinct’ with

the argument that man is a ‘horde animal’ with a disposition to follow an authoritarian

leader, resisting the utopian force of Trotter’s political purpose and his figuring of a

leader in and of the herd, and proposing that gregariousness was a reversal of hostile

feelings based on rivalry (Freud, 1922: 81–9).44 Mainly, however, the dispute about

Trotter’s positive model of association concerned not whether human gregariousness

masked aggressive impulses, as Freud argued, but if it could properly be accounted for

through a biological model of instinct. Ian Suttie argues the notion of the herd instinct

rested upon a false and anthropomorphic association between the social behaviour of

animal societies and human ideals such as morality and reason – or, he could have

argued in Trotter’s case, the conflation of biological and psychological altruism





(Suttie, 1922: 249–54)45 – and proposes association is an acquired social sentiment. In

fact, he argues that the attribution of social behaviour (which requires agency) to an

instinct rests upon an incorrect model of an individual and autonomous mind as

opposed to an instinct functioning as a ‘categorical imperative’: ‘The fact is that mind

is social in origin and content, and individuality is largely an illusion due to the com-

plex interplay of cultural influences . . . Minds do not co-operate to form culture; they

are not the units whose combination forms society, but are formed by society’ (ibid.:

250–1). However, Carl Jung accepted the concept of the herd instinct to express a

‘richly developed’ but inborn social instinct that was the origin of altruism (Jung,

1916: 263; see also 269).46 It was, perhaps, one paradoxical achievement of Trotter’s

work that by citing an instinct he also drew attention to the need to attend to environ-

mental influences shaping collective experience and conduct. For in the wider psycho-

logical community, Arthur Tansley used Trotter’s concept of the herd instinct to

regroup an expanded range of instincts into three main categories of herd, sex and ego

and the attention to the herd instinct in this configuration itself brought about a shift of

emphasis in the clinical context to the consideration of environmental conditions and

social influences (Glueck et al., 1921–2).

The acceptance of Trotter’s call to attend to the dynamics of collectivity stimulated

contemporary attempts to explain social behaviour through a harnessing of biological

and psychological models, as the herd instinct laid claim to a biological foundation in

its invocation of the inherent pressure of evolutionary aims (preservation of the social

unit, or species) but a mental foundation in its reliance on the capacity of sensitiveness

and the influence of intelligence and culture on the varieties of expression given to the

impulse to overcome the loneliness of singularity. The variance from established biolo-

gical methods exposed instinct theory to claims that it was pseudo-scientific (Hampton,

2006: 65), and that the use of the term in the mental and social sciences, as well as psy-

choanalysis, to refer to ‘native urges’ was a resort to a metaphysics based on popular

belief, and an avoidance of the more proper task of configuring the analysis of behaviour

in terms of the ‘habit complexes’ of organized activity understood through experimental

data ‘regarding reactions, coordination, the building and transference of percepts to con-

cepts, learning and habit formation, association, reasoning and imagination’ (Bernard,

1922: 360). But the attempt to account for the divergent expressions of instincts in social

behaviour allowed early forms of social psychology to engage with broader questions of

conduct and social management through the narrating of ‘facts’ deriving from observa-

tion, and the analysis of the eventful texture of social interaction rather than the empirical

analysis of individual response mechanisms, resisting the move to the laboratory and the

construction of mechanistic models in psychology as well as in biological accounts of

evolution. The dangers involved in the adaptation of methods from the natural sciences

to sociological inquiry, as Graham Wallas pointed out, was the ‘fallacy of the ‘‘undistrib-

uted middle’’’ endemic in deriving general laws from particular instances (Wallas, 1914:

137). This was particularly evident in debates about the ways imitation, suggestion and

sympathy operated as the basis of social behaviour, which was contested (see ibid.: 124–

39), and the conceptual variability of the ‘unconscious’ used to account for the operation

of suggestion before it was stabilized (see Rivers’ distinction between ‘unwitting’ and

‘unconscious’, 1920: 9, 15–16, 91–4). Trotter’s work can be seen as symptomatic of a

Swanson 39




distinctively British concern with the way a horizontal model of evolutionary change

could be used to understand social processes and provide enlightened models of govern-

ance and the harnessing of sociological and psychological models to this common aim at

a moment before social psychology lost its sociological underpinning (see Oishi, Kesebir

and Snyder, 2009).

In his insistence on the role of culture and intelligence Trotter created the space for a

humanistic approach to politics and policy formation that was not reliant on the static mod-

els of biologically inherited constitution. His concept of the herd instinct may have been

assessed as scientifically compromised, but the difficulties lay as much with evolutionary

biology as with psychology, as the gradual shift within early 20th-century biology from a

Lamarckian model of evolutionary process on a ‘continuum of increasing complexity’ to

take on the full implications of a Darwinian model of evolution as a ‘random process with

no fixed direction’, created a world which was no longer predictable (see Dunbar, 2007:

31–2).47 The attempts by sociology to overcome the difficulties of its relation to this

unstable model came to be resolved by looking to dynamic psychology, which was more

amenable to an evolutionary than an inheritance model.48 Situated within this contested

field, in his argument regarding the importance of ‘statecraft’ in the works of 1915 and

1919, Trotter develops his psychological approach to society and culture as the basis of

an intervention that would allow humans to seize control of the evolutionary process.

To this extent, Trotter’s model offered a pliable approach to the formation of character and

societies that attempted to resolve what was in fact a disciplinary divergence.49

In the applied context, perhaps the most direct integration of the psychological

model of the herd instinct into practices of social management was that of Hugh

Crichton-Miller, who founded the Tavistock Centre in 1920. Crichton-Miller pro-

posed in a series of lectures to educationalists that teachers should draw on the herd

instinct of children in their classroom practice, in order that the children might learn

to recognize and respond to the claims of the community, and develop an orienta-

tion towards the future.50 The translation of unconscious instincts into conscious

motives, to be acted upon, was a process that involved sublimating individual drives

to an ideal: in the case of the herd instinct, the identification with the collective aim

of society. The education of the individual should be directed to the opportunities

for sublimation, so that individual happiness could be achieved in the context of

socially useful work: ‘Of all the forms of waste perhaps the most extravagant is that

waste of vital human energy which is begun by a repressive and unsuitable form of

education and maintained by forcing individuals into careers in which they have no

opportunity for self-realization’. As well as relating the idea of fulfilment and char-

acter development back to the herd instinct, Crichton-Miller also connected mastery

to ‘happiness’ (understood as ‘unimpeded energy’; Crichton-Miller, 1921: 213–29).51

There were more diffuse ways in which the concept of the herd instinct as a route to

fulfilment appeared in inter-war social thinking on happiness: Bertrand Russell, in one

of his popular texts, which functioned as advice manuals for the good life, defined hap-

piness in ways which were related to ‘simple things: food and shelter, health, love, suc-

cessful work and the respect of one’s own herd’: fear of the herd’s disapproval provided

the basis for a notion of conscience that guided conduct (Russell, 1930: 241, 97;

emphases added).





The take-up of Trotter’s herd instinct, alongside that of William McDougall’s gregar-

ious instinct, in public discussions of questions of social cohesion and collective life

allowed significant resistance to the Freudian emphasis on pleasure and aggression as

the basis of human action in futures thinking, in the years after the Great War. As a mir-

ror of the way Trotter’s emphasis on herd suggestion and herd opinion had brought psy-

chologists to confront the need to consider public opinion as part of their address to

addressing social harms (Glueck et al., 1921–2: 233), his sociological arguments influ-

enced contemporaries in political philosophy, such as Graham Wallas,52 and informed

scientific humanist approaches to ‘social inquiry’ and social planning developed by

Lancelot Hogben and Julian Huxley (Hogben, 1937; see Anker, 2001 and Holdstock,

1984: xi). In particular, Trotter’s early papers had spoken directly to those at the centre

of the movement towards the League of Nations as a pan-national organization that

would cultivate ‘international community’ and ‘world brotherhood’, providing a com-

pelling argument for a form of organization that would draw on deep-seated impulses

to connect with unknown others in the service of larger aims and a transnational activist

network founded on the ‘desires of the people’ (see Murray, 1915; McCarthy, 2010:

120–3; McCarthy, 2011: 187–8, 193–4). Trotter’s association between the herd instinct

and pacifism was elaborated by Tansley into a humanistic argument for international

peace and well-being with a ‘universal herd instinct’ as the basis of ‘the ideal state of

a world federation’ designed to fulfil individual potential through a commitment to

human fellowship and the ‘brotherhood of man’, directly referencing the League of

Nations as the ‘last stage of social evolution’ (Tansley, 1920: 234–42). Tansley’s trans-

lation of Trotter’s manifesto for a horizontal model of social change was influential in

utopian and internationalist thinking. Julian Huxley, for example, used Tansley’s inter-

pretation to develop his humanist model of a ‘fulfilment society’ and his vision of a

‘United Ecology of Nations’, which he pursued in his directorship of UNESCO and

which filtered through into the movement for humanistic planning from the 1930s to the

1950s (Huxley, 1961; see Anker, 2001).

The key to the diffusion of the concept of the herd instinct in such varied contexts was

that Trotter was not just describing the mechanisms of association but, especially in his

later two essays of 1915 and 1919, envisioning the way in which gregariousness could

offer a more complete realization of human potential in the aim of social progress.53

Unanimity could be achieved through an increase in ‘intercommunication’ – technolo-

gies facilitating the circulation of bodies and ideas. These would facilitate a form of

coordinated mutuality, allowing societies to progress towards the expression of altruism

as the purest form of associative behaviour, and preventing herd tradition triumphing

over reason. It is not that the mass was inherently open to the conservatism of herd tra-

dition, but that the conditions of particular herds, the cultural values which emerged in

defined contexts, worked against the exercise of reason, and so resisted its great force for

variability and innovation. It was reason, therefore, in association with and harnessing

the force of instinct, which contained the ‘germ of future changes’ and therefore conso-

lidated Trotter’s situating of the associative impulse in a narrative of potential whose

greatest achievement was in the appearance of altruism. Altruism did not originate in

rational decision and was not the result of a simple suppression of individual interests

or drives. Altruism, rather, promoted unselfishness for a ‘reward in feeling’: ‘Man is

Swanson 41




altruistic because he must be, not because reason recommends it’ (Trotter, 1919: 46).54

To be synchronized with the field of the cultural, altruism had to be regarded in terms of

the mechanisms of psychological association viewed through a framing derived from

evolutionary biology. The moral good located in altruistic behaviour was an achieve-

ment of the evolutionary synthesis between herd instinct and innovation. If variation and

innovation were elements in the distinctive nature of human association, altruism was the

emotional correlate of gregariousness, and its most valuable outcome.

Trotter’s challenge to the hierarchical model of social evolution that had held sway

in Social Darwinism allowed him to provide a democratic model of association,

oriented to cultural innovation and hinged on a permeable model of human feeling pre-

mised on the ‘force of life’.55 This allowed Trotter’s biological model of evolution to

become not just an analogy for gradualist social change, but a premise for returning the

political to the realm of human capacity, and devising social institutions oriented to an

egalitarian model of individual fulfilment.56 His contribution to approaches to collec-

tivity thereby became a touchstone for sociological study as a science of human beha-

viour in Britain, particularly that movement of ideas that informed humanistic and

ecological approaches to ‘futures thinking’, and as a result resonated in British thought

throughout the inter-war period.

Notes

1. Such arguments are commonly made to account for rioting, and resurfaced during the UK riots

of 2011; for example, see The Sun (20 August 2011) and numerous blogs.

2. The term has also been adopted within marketing and finance to explain consumer behaviour

and investment patterns; see, for example, Welteke (2000); Casti (2002). The herd instinct was

widely used as an explanation for consumer trends in early tourism studies (see MacCannell,

2001). For its invocation in relation to social networking, see The Economist’s Babbage blog’s

reporting research into networks of social influence: ‘Online Herd Instinct: Virtual Lem-

mings’ (31 October 2010).

3. It is Nietzsche’s use of the term that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari adopt (1983), implying

that its origin lies in an infantile need to be led.

4. McDougall later suggested that the ‘herd instinct’ was a ‘neater term’ than his own ‘gregarious

instinct’, and refers to Nietszche and Trotter as its popularizers, (1933[1923]: 154).

5. The book was dedicated to L.T. Hobhouse, see below.

6. Glover was a prominent figure in the British psychoanalytic movement and a popularizer of

Freud’s approach.

7. William McDougall became the most prominent and vigorous advocate of this form of British

psychology.

8. All references will be to the 1919 edn. Many writers assume the 1919 book publication to be

the first published appearance of Trotter’s herd instinct. For those interested in the origination

of Trotter’s concept and the later development of his attention to governance, the 1908 paper

comprises pp. 11–41; the 1909 paper pp. 42–65; the 1915 essay ‘Speculations on the Human

Mind’ pp. 66–213; and the Postscript of 1919 pp. 214–59.

9. Harvey C. Greisman sees Trotter’s work as a ‘unique’ but early form of biosociology (1979:

359).





10. The Sociological Society was founded by Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes in 1904. Coun-

cil members before 1914 included Graham Wallas, Ramsay MacDonald, E. Westermarck,

W. H. Beveridge, R. H. Tawney, B. Bosanquet, Gilbert Murray, Sidney Webb, Havelock Ellis,

and Morris Ginsberg (see Soffer, 1978: 309 and Van Ginneken, 2007: 64). See also Renwick

(2012).

11. And in respect of Trotter’s invocation of the ‘force of life’, it is relevant that energetic models

inform the Spenserian conception of social evolution. As McKinnon argues, Spenser did not just

apply biological models as metaphors but saw energetic principles as common to inorganic,

organic and social planes of evolution: ‘the universe and planetary-geological evolution, as well

as living organisms and societies, are all to be understood in terms of the same evolutionary prin-

ciples. These principles of evolution are derived from his understanding of the principles of

energy, or, as he usually prefers to call it, Force’ (McKinnon, 2010: 445).

12. This argument is made in a letter Hobhouse wrote to defend sociology as an integrative

science while at the LSE.

13. This is not to doubt the immense ‘psychiatric fallout’ of the Great War, and the impact of indi-

vidual psychology on the development of a language of ‘morale’. Rather, it is to argue that the

integration of models of collective psychology into social thinking contributed to the intellec-

tual landscape in which an agenda of citizens’ rights could inform mental health provision and

policy as a result of the attention to psychological trauma in the war context (see Barham,

2004: 5). It is also to disentangle the emergence of psychological thinking from a model of

shock as a way of conceiving the impact of environmental stimulus on the individual, and

to highlight the prevalence of models of adaptation, evolution and relationality in collective

psychology. The contexts in which a psychological address to the democratic subject was

developed, and upon which the lessons of the Great War impacted, were altogether more var-

ied and contradictory, and as Mathew Thomson (2006) and Rhodri Hayward (2007) have

shown, many of the strands of thinking out of which the new psychology developed in early

20th-century Britain were derived from the confluence of theological, sociological and psy-

chological approaches in the formulation of a concept of the unconscious. See also Groth and

Lusty (2013) for an expansion of the intellectual landscape of psychological derivations

beyond the disciplinary to aesthetics, philosophy and the vernacular.

14. See Dixon (2008) for the association of sociological and psychological approaches to altruism

in 19th-century Britain and Collini (1991) for its use in political philosophy. Both stress that a

moral language of altruism was developed as part of a secular framework for the cultivation of

selflessness in the interests of human happiness and to redress social inequities.

15. This is perhaps why Van Ginneken suggests it has little influence on the major theoretical

traditions (2007: 69). Gilbert Murray (1915), for example, summarized contemporary

approaches to the ‘herd instinct’ in ways that reflect Trotter’s account but without even

referring to him – though he refers to Galton’s original discussion of the term. Murray was

a prominent member of the Sociological Society, so it is almost impossible that his discus-

sion was framed without an awareness of Trotter’s work. See also Howerth’s discussion of

the role of the herd instinct in the Great War which mentions only Galton, Le Bon and

McDougall (1919). Rivers (1920) mentions the herd instinct but his reference is to McDou-

gall’s work on gregariousness.

16. Jupp and Magennis note the tendency of historians to examine confrontational and contesting

crowds to the exclusion of other forms of public association (2000: 6), while Mark Harrison

Swanson 43




emphasizes the discipline of organized protest and the role of crowds ‘as autonomous, or

quasi-autonomous vehicles for the expression of cohesion’ (1988: 1–27).

17. Though Teresa Brennan points out that Le Bon also argued that ‘a crowd was capable, ethi-

cally, of far more than an individual’ (2004: 54).

18. Though Urs Staheli proposes the concept of the irrational crowd becomes a means of envisa-

ging the consequences of modern democratic ideals, rather than an elitist derogation of the

popular mind, complicating our view of writers such as Le Bon (2006: 273).

19. While Le Bon does identify those contexts, such as the theatre, which allow crowds to share

‘lofty’ moral responses (2005[1896]: 48–9), this is not the force of his argument.

20. Trotter acknowledges that Le Bon’s book includes a ‘certain amount of valuable work

in the observation of the behaviour of crowds’ but notes the limitations of Le Bon’s

extrapolation of social generalities from the more extreme manifestations of crowd

behaviour (1919: 26).

21. Sidis’ work differs from Le Bon’s and Sighele’s negative view of democracy: he argued that

education could counter the effects of suggestion (see Wiener, 1971: 73 n.). He later became

one of the editors of The Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, in which

Trotter’s concept of the herd instinct became recognized as an essential component of clinical

psychology (see Glueck et al., 1921–2).

22. Nicholas Rogers, for example, proposes that Trotter ‘used Le Bon as a springboard for his

speculations on the herd instinct’ (1998: 4) and LeMahieu claims Le Bon’s work ‘found its

kindred spirit in the writings of . . . Wilfred Trotter’ (1988: 108).

23. Van Ginneken also argues that Le Bon’s importance in the French context has been exagger-

ated (2007: 51–9, 141).

24. When the liberal economist J. A. Hobson invoked the ‘Spirit of the . . . Herd’ as the true spirit

of ‘Society’, for example, he still saw this in terms of the assimilation of individual minds fus-

ing into an organic whole, a ‘common consciousness’ reflecting ‘a single unity of purpose in

the community’ (1909: 71–6).

25. This is particularly so in Trotter’s first two articles, but is evident throughout his sociological

writing (see Trotter, 1941).

26. See also Greisman (1979: 361) for Trotter’s ‘melioristic enthusiasm’.

27. Crook seizes on Trotter’s discussion of the ‘restless pugnacity’ of humans, mentioning his

association of the herd instinct with altruism and pacifism only in order to move towards a

critique of his ‘uni-causal bio-instinctivism’ and the ‘occult’ nature of crowd psychology’s use

of ‘sweeping collective instincts of ‘‘imitation’’ or ‘‘suggestion’’’ (1994: 148–51).

28. For evidence of Trotter’s pacifism see Trotter (1919: 126). This view is supported by Greis-

man (1979: 365–6) and Holdstock (1984).

29. Acknowledged by the ecologist Arthur George Tansley, to whom he introduced Freud’s work

(see Anker, 2001: 19–20).

30. This constituted a departure from studies of the determinations of heredity and the description

of static states, a shift that was taking place in botany in the repudiation of plant morphology,

for example (see Anker, 2001: 89).

31. Van Ginneken indicates Pearson elaborated Galton’s concept of gregariousness (2007: 62).

32. Like Pearson’s, Trotter’s view was that the social unit to which that sympathy bound the indi-

vidual, was the nation, and any subcategory would weaken its ability to survive as a cohesive

community (Pearson, 1905[1901]: 52–3).





33. Both of these are factors in human evolution: ‘consciously or unconsciously, one type of life is

fighting against a second type, and all life is struggling with its physical environment’

(Pearson, 1905[1901]: 49).

34. Pearson’s work was highly regarded in terms of scientific method by contemporaries of Trot-

ter (Cameron and Forrester, 2000: 224). Trotter objects to Pearson’s aim to eliminate ‘inferior’

races on the basis that it removes those lines of variation which allow change and adaptation

(see Greisman, 1979: 366). Mandler notes (citing Thomson, 2006) that the attempts of Trotter,

as well as Alexander Shand and William McDougall, to explain national differences without

reducing them to race, and to conceive of measures to support international peace, were taken

seriously by intellectuals of their time (2006: 156).

35. As Dunbar (2007) points out, this blurring of Lamarckian (in the movement towards increas-

ing complexity) and Darwinian (evolution by natural selection) models is common in this

period and also evident in the work of Herbert Spenser, from whom many aspects of Trotter’s

view of social evolution derive.

36. Van Ginneken also identifies ‘a clear plea for the recognition of the pro-social potential of

man and the humanitarian potential in society’ though he links these only to the first two arti-

cles as opposed to seeing it as a concerted narrative (2007: 67).

37. If gregariousness was the instinct underpinning the impulse to associate, the herd instinct

added to this a responsiveness to suggestion. See Blackman (2007: 574–96) for an examina-

tion of Tarde’s translation of the concept of suggestion from a paradigm of contagion to one

that acknowledged a diverse field of social influence and response, and its use in the early

social psychological writings of William McDougall and Edward Ross.

38. The capacity to vary the mode of reaction to instinctive impulses was what differentiated

human responses from those of other gregarious animals (and insects such as ants and honey

bees). These could manifest in forms which masked the original impulse, and even appear to

deny the existence of impulse altogether: Trotter used as illustration the ascetic practices of

monks, nuns and martyrs, which stood as evidence of the strength of the primary instincts,

even as they appeared to represent their denial (1919: 97).

39. Trotter sees this as having the potential to contribute to a ‘true science of politics’, the pre-

dictions about human behaviour that this would enable contributing to a form of ‘statecraft’

based on biological truths about human nature rather than political convictions (Trotter,

1919: 99–100).

40. This is a point he developed through a discussion of Boris Sidis’ Psychology of Suggestion

(1903) in which Sidis proposed a subconscious:

. . . embodying the ‘lower’ and more brutal qualities of man. It is irrational, imitative, credulous,

cowardly, cruel, and lacks all individuality, will, and self control. This personality takes the place of

the normal personality during hypnosis and when the individual is part of an active crowd, as, for

example, in riots, panics, lynchings, revivals, and so forth . . . Suggestibility is the cement of the

herd, the very soul of the primitive social group . . . Man is a social animal, no doubt, but he is

social because he is suggestible. (Sidis, cited in Trotter, 1919: 27–8)

41. Here, Trotter uses William James’ link between instinct and human motives in his discussion

of the ‘a priori synthesis’ between sensation and action to argue that thoughts and actions

based on instinct appear to rest on an ‘axiomatically obvious proposition’.

Swanson 45




42. This critical feature in Trotter’s herd instinct has been given insufficient attention, and has led

to the role of suggestion in his account being overstressed. Teresa Brennan, for example, even

goes so far as to refer to Trotter’s fourth instinct as ‘suggestibility’ (2004: 55). Brennan sees

the transmission of affect as ‘a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in

effect’, reflecting the distrust with which instinctual models of human action are regarded

within social and cultural theory. By substituting suggestion for the herd as the primary term,

Brennan not only overlooks the important dimension of the drive towards association, satis-

fied by the simple presence of others, but in her quest to infuse the motivation for action with

social meaning, she collapses the instinct with the mechanism by which the impulse is

expressed. Situating the social as the origin of human association (rather than its expression)

this view posits the biological and physical as the register of the social rather than as the mate-

rial of human experience, seeking to explain ‘how a social and psychological affect buries

itself within or rests on the skin of an utterly corporeal body’ but not how that corporeality

contributes to the energy (or impulse) that underlies affect (2004: 3).

43. The law of equilibrium was used to explain ‘systems of planets and atoms . . . plants and the

human mind’ as well as to analyse economic systems, in disciplinary inquiry in this period

(see Anker, 2001: 31).

44. Pick notes that, in comparison, Freud’s discussion of group psychology is relatively abstract

and generic (1995: 39–61).

45. Suttie argued here that the associative tendency appeared too late to be accounted for biolo-

gically, so must therefore be associated with the sexual instinct, though in his later critique of

Freud, Suttie proposed a capacity for altruism developed in the mutual embrace of the infant’s

relation with the mother and argued that it could not be reduced to the sexual instinct, as it is in

Freud’s model (see Suttie, 1935).

46. Bernard (1922: 361) mistakenly implies that Trotter popularizes Jung’s use of the term, per-

haps on the basis of the publication dates of Jung’s and Trotter’s books, whereas Jung’s men-

tion of the term in Analytical Psychology (1916) appears a decade after Trotter’s lecture to the

Sociological Society (1906), and several years after his subsequent papers, published in 1908

and 1909.

47. The use of different disciplines to address the various stages and processes of evolution was an

assumed part of sociological thinking: ‘This spectrum of scientific fields and subject matters is

also understood as a temporal sequence in ‘‘the great evolution’’: The different sciences can

then be understood as each contributing to solving the problems which different stages of an

evolutionary process pose, their respective theoretical models as symbolizing different stages’

(Quilley, 2010: 395).

48. This was not restricted to social scientists; the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane also saw psychology

as the next stage in human knowledge, superseding biology in his account of the evolution of

scientific thought: ‘man’s gradual conquest, first of space and time, then of matter as such,

then of his own body and those of other living things, and finally the subjugation of the dark

and evil elements in his own soul’ (Haldane, 1924: 82).

49. See Dunbar’s account of the rift between evolutionary biology and the social sciences in the

early 20th century, and the continuation of Lamarckian models: ‘Progressive evolution contin-

ued to be a major foundation for understanding sociality within the social sciences for the bet-

ter part of half a century after it had been discredited within biology. More importantly, when

evolutionary ideas were eventually firmly ejected from the social sciences once and for all, it





continued to colour sociologists’ perceptions and understanding of evolutionary biology’

(Dunbar, 2007: 32).

50. Crichton-Miller departs from Trotter’s horizontal model by creating a division between ‘nor-

mal social influences’ which he proposes percolate from the ‘higher levels of the mental life of

the community’ downwards, and ‘mob hysteria’, in which an idea spreads upwards from the

‘lower levels of thought and desire’ and so dominates attention and acts without the corrective

of the lessons of history (1921: 203–5).

51. Crichton-Miller specifically mentions F. W. Sanderson’s term as head of Oundle School,

Alexander Devine at Clayesmore, and Cecil Grant at St George’s School, Harpenden, all pro-

gressive boarding schools. St George’s introduced a Montessori unit in 1917. H. G. Wells was

a strong supporter of the alternative education movement and particularly the work of

Sanderson.

52. Graham Wallas recommends Trotter’s first essay in the preface to Human Nature in Politics

(1908). Wallas influences Walter Lippman’s early psychological approach to a democratic

political science of public opinion (Lippman, 1914; see also Wiener, 1971).

53. Though without reference, these appear indebted to Graham Wallas’ The Great Society, pub-

lished in 1914.

54. Trotter attributed to Karl Pearson the idea that human altruism was an instinctive product

(Trotter, 1919: 24).

55. Greisman’s summary of Trotter’s position is that ‘the continued existence of the human race is

predicated on the ability and willingness of humanity to accept their affinity and connected-

ness with the rest of the animate world’ (1979: 360).

56. In this, he is closer to the political theory of the socialist Fabian Graham Wallas than Social

Darwinism.

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Swanson 49




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Author biography

Gillian Swanson is Associate Professor in Cultural History at the University of the West of

England, Bristol. She is the author of Drunk with the Glitter: Space, Consumption and Sexual

Instability in Modern Urban Culture (2007), and co-editor of the new Routledge Monograph

Series, ‘Directions in Cultural History’.





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