Wilhelm Wundt's Critical Loyalty: Balancing Gendered Virtues Among Early Experimental Psychologists

Abstract

Scholarly personae draw on a catalogue of middle-class and aristocratic virtues. Since these virtues are not part of a cohesive system of virtues, they are likely to come into conflict with each other. This paper analyses two virtues that coexisted within a highly masculine conception of good scholarship among nineteenth-century German experimental psychologists. A close analysis of the relations between the Leipzig psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and some of his closest collaborators—the senior scholar Gustav Theodor Fechner, the talented but vulnerable Ludwig Lange, and the successful Hugo Münsterberg—shows the outlines of a dynamic moral economy of scholarship in which scholars balance the sometimes supplementary and sometimes conflicting virtues of loyalty and independence in a variety of ways.