Reading :: Psychology in Utopia

Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology
By Alex Kozulin

You may remember Alex Kozulin as the editor of the 1986 Vygotsky's Thought and Language 2ed. In his introduction of that book, Kozulin demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the Vygotsky Circle and its context. So when I realized he had written a 1984 book (also with MIT Press) on the history of Soviet psychology, I knew I had to pick it up.

Keep in mind that in 1984, when Kozulin published this book, the USSR was still going strong, as was the Cold War. Kozulin's bio on the book jacket doesn't make clear whether he was still a Soviet citizen at the time, but it notes that he had taught at Boston University and Ben-Gurion University.

In any case, the book provides a critical view of the development of Soviet psychology. It starts with a detailed timeline—to which I intend to return. Next is an introduction that lays out the problems of investigating Soviet psychology. "Anyone who has ever approached the study of Soviet psychology knows that the subject is inherently paradoxical," he says, noting that although Soviet psychology is superficially similar to its Western counterpart, concepts

emerge from a social context that is almost utopian. The conceptual systems of Soviet authors turn out to be buried under layers of ideological verbiage. Published papers and official records must not be taken at face value but rather as rough material for subsequent distillation and decoding. The task of a scholar in Soviet research thus takes on an almost hermeneutical character. Like a historian studying a culture remote in time and space, the specialist in Soviet psychology must reconstruct the subject starting with fragments and adopting a mentality that has little in common with his or her own. (p.1)

Kozulin cautions us against two "equally misleading tendencies in the interpretation of Soviet research": (1) explaining Soviet psychological doctrines as a result of conformance with Soviet ideology and (2) explaining it purely in terms of intellectual history (p.2). Rather, Kozulin advocates the "third way" of "a socially informed study of Soviet psychology that would distinguish between the actual conditions of its development and those secondary interpretations that are invented in order to present these conditions in ideologically coherent form" (p.2). And that is what this book attempts to achieve.

Kozulin adds that the "existing" Vygotsky publications in the West were "concocted" from his writings from different periods (p.3) and "analytic comments accompanying the translations have been prepared under the strong influence of Vygotsky's students, Alexei Leontiev and Alexander Luria, who have offered a biased interpretation of Vygotsky's theory, sometimes substituting their own ideas for those of their teacher" (p.4). (Recall that the 1962 version of Thought and Language was much shorter than the 1986 version that Kozulin would later oversee.)

With that introduction, Kozulin moves into the overview of "generations" of Soviet psychologists: the pre-Revolutionary psychologists, the ones that emerged immediately after the Revolution; the ones that emerged in the 1950s, post-Stalin; and those who emerged in the 1970s. I'm specifically interested in the second group, so I'll concentrate on them here.

As Kozulin notes, "the first generation of post-Revolutionary scholars largely shared the utopian program of their time." The Revolution was a "cosmic" and fundamentally transformative event. These scholars shared "a faith that rationalized and fair interpersonal relations would be a hallmark of the coming communist society," one that would be characterized by "a new kind of person—the liberated proletarian, with new morals, culture, and rules of conduct" (p.15).

These scholars generally opposed idealism in favor of materialism. But their interpretation of "materialism" tended to reduce psychology to reflexes and reactions. As Kozulin says, only one group resisted this trend: The Vygotsky Circle (p.18), which argued that higher mental functions could be studied materially, but not through low-level biological phenomena such as reflexes. Unfortunately for the Vygotskians, there was no clear-cut way to identify the Marxist ideal, nor the methods of study that could be considered legitimately Marxist. "Only one thing was certain: that scientific, Marxist psychology must have a single correct methodology" (p.19; compare Leontiev on this point). "The idea of one, and only one, correct methodology was a natural offspring of the intellectual atmosphere of this period" (p.19). Naturally, if there is only one way, but no clear-cut criteria for identifying it, no one can have absolute assurance that they are on the right path—and any school can accuse the others of being on the wrong path. And that is essentially what happened in Soviet psychology over time. "As a result of mutual ideological accusations almost all Soviet psychologists had been found guilty of dangerous deviations from the Party line and therefore became easy prey for Party functionaries (p.21).

So: "If in the 1920s the problem was to develop behavioral science within the framework of Marxist terminology, in the 1930s it was to derive the categories of consciousness and behavior directly from the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin" (p.21). During the Stalinist purges, "A low profile seemed the best strategy for survival" (p.22); two schools that followed this pattern were the Uznade school (discussed further in Ch.4) and the Kharkov school, made up of "former students and colleagues of Lev Vygotsky" and most prominently including Leontiev (p.22-23). The Kharkov school used Vygotsky's concept of internalization, but disagreed with him about "the role of signs in the internalization process":

Vygotsky's emphasis on signs as means of mediation between objects of experience and mental functions was replaced by the thesis that physical action must mediate between a subject and the external world. The work of the Kharkov school established an experimental base for Leontiev's theory of the psychology of activity, which was recognized in the 1960s as an official Soviet psychological doctrine. (p.23, my emphasis). 

Meanwhile, Rubinstein "ventured to derive psychological categories directly from the works of Marx and Lenin," yielding not a methodology but a "highly professional ... presentation of Marxist philosophical anthropology, which he tried to pass off as the theoretical foundation of behavioral science" (p.23). Kozulin notes that Rubinstein chose his moment carefully, launching an impressive career that was later derailed in the 1940s during an outburst of Russian chauvinism and anti-cosmopolitanism (which was operationalized as anti-Semitism). Consequently, Rubinstein "lost all of his administrative positions" and in his place "Leontiev was appointed chairman of the Department of Psychology at Moscow University" (pp.24-25).

The circular firing squad of Soviet psychology continued. Stalin published a 1951 paper on linguistics, and suddenly psychologists had to incorporate these ideas into their studies. During a 1952 All-Union meeting, prominent psychologists (including Leontiev and Luria) "all hastened to accuse each other of the serious 'deviations' from the prescribed scientific ideology" (p.26).

Fortunately, Stalin died in 1953 and Khrushchev "exposed the atrocities of the Stalin era" in 1956 (p.26); "once-forbidden names such as Vygotsky and Shpilrein now reappeared in the pages of books and articles" (p.27). From that point through the 1960s, Soviet psychology experienced a "renaissance" in which suppressed studies now came into public view and "almost every psychologist of the second generation published his magnum opus in these years" (p.27). For instance, Leontiev's Problems of the Development of Mind was published in 1959 and won the Lenin Prize in 1963, and Luria published "dozens of books in neuropsychology" (p.27). Kozulin concludes:

After years of political pressure, forced confessions, and cross-allegations, psychologists of this generation, now in their sixties, at last occupied solid and unshakeable positions in the universities and research centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and Tbisili. One can only imagine how they felt about themselves after all these years. (p.27)

Since my major interest is activity theory, I'll skip much of what Kozulin says about the subsequent two generations. But let me highlight one event:

One peculiarity of this period of Soviet psychology, stemming from the lack of theoretical work in the Stalin period, has been the rediscovery of many studies conducted in the 1920s. The work of Lev Vygotsky has been central to this movement. New light has been shed on the Kharkov school, which not only developed Vygotsky's ideas, but also revised some of his principal theses. The revisionist version established by Alexei Leontiev and his colleagues was for a while considered a genuine continuation of Vygotsky's program. In 1979, however, at a colloquium dedicated to the theoretical legacy of Vygotsky, Georgy Schedrovitsky pointed out a number of discrepancies between Vygotsky's and Leontiev's concepts of the cultural-historical development of the mind. In discussions and publications that followed, Vasili Davydoc and Vladimir Zinchenko offered their own versions of the controversy. (pp.32-33)

This disjuncture between Vygotksy and the Kharkov school is one of Kozulin's major interests, showing up in his introduction to Thought and Language and in other articles.

In Chapter 2, Kozulin discusses Pavlov and Bekhterev. I'll just note one thing here. According to Kozulin, Soviet "Pavlovianization" was due in part to Russian chauvinism and xenophobia. Pavlov was "100 percent Russian"—which is to say, not Jewish (p.49).

Chapter 3 discusses Bernstein's work. Bernstein rejected the Pavlovian doctrine in favor of "a study of feedback mechanisms in the physiology of body movements. This was cybernetics a decade before Norbert Weiner coined the term" (p.62). Leontiev considered building on Bernstein's work in his discussion of levels of activity, but eventually abandoned the idea and reduced his references to Bernstein's work (p.70).

Chapter 4 discusses the problem of the unconscious. Kozulin notes a "growing rivalry" in the 1960s between "Leontiev's theory of activity and Uznadzean set theory"; but "during the 1960s and 1970s Leontiev's theory became virtually the official Soviet psychological doctrine, and all other trends were pressured to admit it as a general theoretical framework" (p.99).

Chapter 5 focuses on the "continuing dialogue" about Lev Vygotsky. Kozulin notes that "Vygotsky had seemingly left behind a cohort of devoted disciples" who took risks to develop his theories when his name was "'blacklisted'". "After Vygotsky had been scientifically rehabilitated," Kozulin notes archly, "they praised him publicly but were still unable or unwilling to publish his manuscripts. In the meantime their own books based on his writings came off press one after another" (p.102).

Kozulin goes into the details of Vygotsky's theory and history (details that are covered in other reviews on this blog). But he notes that Vygotsky and his students largely steered clear from the accusations that characterized other schools of psychology in that era (p.106).

After Vygotsky's death in 1934, the 1936 pedology decree condemned the work of pedologists; since Vygotsky had tried to develop pedology as a field, Kozulin states, "the disciples who wanted to develop Vygotsky's theory had to do so without naming their leader" (p.110). So, Kozulin says, Leontiev completed his Problems of the Development of Mind in 1940 (and publsihed in 1947) (p.110). It was clearly an extension of Vygotsky's work, but it did not mention Vygotsky at all. Was that because Leontiev wanted to see his book published and he thought Vygotsky's name would keep that from happening? Or was he reframing cultural-historical theory as his own, not giving credit to Vygotsky for the early work? "It is impossible" to determine, Kozulin says (p.111).

In any case, Leontiev and the other members of the Kharkov school "developed Vygotsky's theory but also abandoned some of his essential ideas" (p.111). Kozulin quotes Zinchenko from 1939, claiming that Vygotsky's mistake was in reducing the mind's sociohistorical determination to "'the influence of human culture on the individual'," not accounting for "'material interaction between the human subject and reality'" (quoted on p.111). So

Vygotsky's thesis of the psychological tool as a mediating point between objects of action and mental functions was replaced by the thesis that material activity mediates between the subject and the external world. In 1956 Leontiev reiterated this thesis, simultaneously asserting that Vygotsky's emphasis on signs as psychological tools was transitory and that his theory of activity was therefore the authentic development of Vygotsky's ideas. (p.111).

To challenge this viewpoint, Kozulin turns to Vygotsky's unpublished book The Cultural and Historical Crisis in Psychology. Based on this work, he asserts that human praxis is the stone that the builders rejected and that should become the chief cornerstone (p.115). That is, when a concept (such as Pavlov's reflexes) becomes an explanatory principle, "a vicious cycle of object and principle immediately emerges: Reflexes as the objects of study turn out to be explained by reflexes as conceptual units. Vygotsky sought to break the circle by adopting the concept of praxis as an explanatory principle 'external' to the psychological functions under investigation" (p.115).

We see this vicious circle at work in Leontiev's activity theory, Kozulin asserts. "Unwilling to use the categories of culture or praxis as explanatory principles, Leontiev and his colleagues doomed themselves to the vicious circle in which material activity as an object is explained through material activity as an explanatory principle" (p.118). But "Vygotsky, in contrast, suggested focusing on the system of symbolic interaction as the meeting place of society and individual and investigating the symbolic aspects of human praxis. Thus his interest in culture as a mediating point between individual and world can by no means be treated as transient" (p.118).

Kozulin asserts that "Vygotsky's theory of psychological tools developed in three stages":

1. Usage of signs as external means to master the individual's psychological functions.
2. Means as tools for developing speech and intelligence.
3. Inner speech; the relations between meaning and senses of words (pp.118-119)

But Vygotsky's students underplayed the aspect of inner speech (p.119). 

The book has more chapters, but they are not immediately applicable to this discussion on the development of activity theory so I'll leave them out.

In any case, the book is excellent. Kozulin writes lucidly and in great detail. I'm not sure how widely shared his assessment of Vygotsky's disciples is, nor his critique of their adaptation of his work, but I appreciated his careful plotting of the argument. If you're interested in the development of activity theory, Vygotskian thought, or just Soviet psychology in general, I recommend this book highly.

Reading :: Vygotsky's Psychology

Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas
By Alex Kozulin

Another day, another Kozulin book on Russian psychology. This one is, as the title suggests, a biography of Vygotsky. Although I had read many of these details elsewhere, this biography did a nice job of pulling them together.

Kozulin begins, as is customary, with the birth and youth of his subject. Vygotsky was "born in 1896 to a middle-class Jewish family." Kozulin uses the story to discuss pre-Revolutionary Russia, its censorship, and its pogroms against Jews (Vygotsky was Jewish). The year that Vygotsky graduated from high school, the minister of education declared that Jewish students would be selected for Moscow University, not by merit, but by lot; Vygotsky, who had the grades to get in by merit, was convinced that he would not be able to attend, but luck was with him and he was selected by the draw. "One may well wonder whether Vygotsky, like many other young Jewish intellectuals, embraced the new Soviet regime primarily because it promised to end all forms of ethnic discrimination" (p.14).

Young Vygotsky was an avid reader of Hegel, with his dialectical understanding of historical development (p.16), focus on mediation and concepts (pp.16-17), and examination of objectivization, in which "any process is crystallized in certain structures or objects" and can be seen as "moments of self-realization of the process" (p.17). But Vygotsky was also deeply affected by linguist Alexander Potebnya's book Thought and Language (pp.18-19), which sketched out the relationships between the two: "(a) thought coincides with language, (b) language serves as an external envelope of thought, and (c) thought achieves its becoming in language" (p.19). Potebnya championed the third interpretation. (In Vygotsky's own book of the same name, he did as well.)

Skipping a bit, we get to post-Revolutionary Russia, in which the young Vygotsky, teaching at Gomel, writes his textbook Educational Psychology. Kozulin says: "The textbook leaves one with an uneasy feeling that it is a 'chimeric' work. One part of it is hardly compatible with another, and the author seems to be speaking in a number of different voices" (p.67).

But in the next chapter, Kozulin turns to the paper Vygotsky delivered at the 1924 Second Psychoneurological Conference, the one that resulted in his move to Moscow. In this paper, Vygotsky argued that reflexology was not up to addressing more complex forms of behavior; he argued that thought, consciousness, and language should be the focus of psychological study, not introspectively, but empirically, by provoking observable manifestations of mental processes (pp.74-75). This argument made a deep impression on A.R. Luria, who arranged for Vygotsky to join the Institute of Pscyhology in Moscow (p.75).

The Institute, like so many Soviet institutions, was in crisis. As Kozulin explains, many were attempting to transform different sciences into "Marxist" sciences. "The recipe in most cases was very similar: some existing experimental methods were combined with a number of quotes from Marx, Engels or Lenin, and the resultant text was presented as an example of a new science" (p.79). The Institute's new head, Konstantin Kornilov, followed this formula: He took Engels' dialectical laws as the fundamental laws of the new Marxist philosophy, then "used psychological examples to underscore the validity of these laws" (p.79). This approach "resulted in the abandonment of the terminology of mental states and processes" (p.80).

In contrast, Vygotsky wanted to understand what was unique about human behavior, and he proposed doing this by examining "the historical character of human behavior and learning"; "the social nature of human experience"; and human behavior's "twofold nature as a mental activity and as an external action" (pp.81-82). Vygotsky noted that human beings, unlike animals, adapt their environment to themselves, following a changing mental design (p.82; cf. Marx). Although Vygotsky did not cite Mead, their ideas were close (p.83).

Moving along. Vygotsky further explored the issues of a Marxist psychology in his unpublished 1927 book The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology. Among other things, Kozulin argues that if we look at Vygotsky's writings as a whole, he did distinguish between (a) purposive tool mediation and (b) cultural cognition depending on intersubjective communication, investigable through changes in word meanings. "Practice then becomes divided into material production and human cultural production" (p.105). And "the fact that Vygotsky's theoretical program was interpreted differently by various groups of his followers reflects the dissimilarities in their philosophies of practice." One is Leontiev's activity theory, which is "rooted in the classical Marxist interpretation of practice as material production" (p.105). A second reading "—which has been undertaken only recently—focuses on the role of language and other symbolic mediators," mediators that can "become independent of the system" and "create their own symbolic construction of reality" (p.105). More about this later.

In Chapter 4, Kozulin recounts the expansion of the Vygotsky Circle, first the three (Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev), then eight (adding Bozhovich, Levina, Morozova, Slavina, and Zaprozhets) (pp.110-111). "All of the members accepted Vygotsky's theoretical leadership and each was free to use Vygotsky's ideas in his or her own research" (p.111). Similarly, Vygotsky based some of his works on the studies of others in his Circle (p.111).

Kozulin summarizes Vygotsky's theory in this way:

Vygotsky's theory was based on a number of interlocking concepts, such as the notion of higher mental processes, the notion of mediated activity, and the notion of psychological tools. Human higher mental processes, according to Vygotsky, are functions of mediated activity. (p.112)

Kozulin then examines the "constitutent elements of this theoretical 'formula'" (p.112):

• "Higher mental processes": These are mediated, not simply continuations of lower functions. (p.112)
• "From action to thought": "the higher mental process is a function of socially meaningful activity," illustrated by the infant's attempt to grasp something, which eventually turns into pointing. (pp.113-114)
• "Mediation": Mediation can be through tools, symbols, or the behavior of another. Vygotsky's mediation links "Vygotsky's theory of higher mental functions with the Marxist theory of material praxis." (p.115)
• "Internalization": "What first appears as an external sign-mediator or an interpersonal communication later becomes an internal psychological process" (p.116). 
• "'Primitive' processes": Some intermediate processes can be detected "between" natural functions and higher mental processes. (p.117). 

Kozulin then goes into the problem of mediation. He notes that in Hegel, and later in Marx, work is seen as "a source of universal mediation"; the concept "eventually became a central category in Marxist philosophical anthropology. Work is what creates a universal system of 'communication' based on the exchange of commodities" (p.120). Kozulin warns: 

But whoever accepts material production as a paradigmatic form of human activity must also accept the consequences of such a paradigm. Specifically, it may lead to the identification of human existence as "reified." The phenomenon of reification points to such a mode of human activity when products of this activity are perceived as independent natural "things" rather than as the result of human effort. Moreover, human activity itself becomes reified and perceived as a commodity. The issue of Marxist social theory in general and reification in particular is raised here because Vygotsky's emphasis on tools as mediators creates a possibility for interpreting material production as an explanatory principle of his theory. This very position has ben adopted by some modern students ...

 Moreover, Vygotsky's followers, particularly Leontiev, did develop a theory of psychological activity based on the paradigm of material production as it is interpreted in traditional Marxism. In Leontiev's psychological theory human motives and objects of activity are determined by the division of labor in society, while more concrete actions are related to practical goals. What is problematic in Leontiev's attempt to link the study of psychological activity with Marxist social theory was his reluctance to elaborate on the applicability of the material production paradigm and to face up to the phenomenon of reification. (pp.120-121)

Kozulin notes that Vygotsky's "claim that human mental functions are social in origin and in content," although seemingly grounded in Marxist theory, only had one actual precedent: Durkheim (p.122). Later, after Luria's cross-cultural psychology study of the Uzbeks, Luria and Vygotsky were accused of being a follower of Durkheim, who was regarded as too bourgeois (p.132). Kozulin notes that the political failure of the Uzbek study meant that Vygotsky and his followers were curtailed from using "primitive" people as proxies for understanding changes based in historical changes in social and cultural organization of societies (p.132; Kozulin does not mention that this notion of historical stages of development has been abandoned by current anthropology).

Chapter 5 discusses Vygotsky's Thought and Language, referenced earlier. Like Potebnya, Vygotsky argued that intellect and speech had different genetic roots, developing along different lines, but "at a certain moment these two developmental lines become intertwined, whereupon thought becomes verbal, and speech intellectual. This moment signifies a switch from a natural track of development to a cultural one" (p.153). Egocentric speech develops into (a) inner speech-for-oneself and (b) communicative speech-for-others (p.174).

Along these lines, Kozulin notes that although there is no evidence that Vygotsky and Bakhtin influenced each other, "their positions in the realm of twentieth-century thought bear intriguing signs of similarity": overlap in their sources; overlap in their personal networks (Vygotsky's cousin David and Bakhtin belonged to the same intellectual circle in Leningrad); and their rediscovery in the West at about the same time (p.180). Yet Vygotsky believed that monological thought was superior to dialogical (p.184).

Chapter 7 examines Vygotsky's work with defectology and pedology. In fact, after Vygotsky's death and the banning of pedology, Vygotsky's theory "managed to survive in a subliminal form at the Institute of Defectology," where some of Vygotsky's Circle rode out the stormy 1930s and 1940s (p.207).

Chapter 8 examines what happened to Vygotsky's ideas after his death. Kozulin notes that Leontiev and the Kharkovites refocused away from symbolic psychological tools and toward activities (centered on labor) (p.247). Consequently, symbolic psychological tools and culture were underrepresented in the 1930s-1960s (p.247). Kozulin specifically examines Leontiev's activity theory, noting that the levels of activity involve "two different conceptual languages: one used on the level of activities and the other on the level of actions and operations" (p.251). The level of activities used categories of Marxist social philosophy; "the subject presumed by the use of these categories was the social-historical, and therefore psychologically rather abstractive subject." But "actions and operations were studied with the psychological paradigm," which was roughly Piagetan and did not link firmly to the social categories. As Kozulin notes, Rubinshtein noticed and critiqued this gap. Kozulin concludes: "One may suggest that what was missing from Leontiev's model was precisely the stratum of culture—emphasized by Vygotsky, and neglected by his followers—that could provide a link between individual action and the social systems from which it derives its meaning" (p.251).

(One might also suggest that third-generation activity theory's synthesis with Bakhtinian dialogism is an attempt to retrofit activity theory with this missing component of semiotic mediation.)

Leontiev was in a box here, Kozulin argues:

The Marxists were remarkably unsuccessful at depicting the positive, creative aspects of human action as conditioned by a social system. This lack of success had been explained as a reflection of the true condition prevalent in capitalist society, the condition of alienation. Unalienated, free action was reserved for future socialist life. But Leontiev could not use this line of defense because he was studying people in what was called a "state of accomplished socialism." He chose to avoid the psychological discussion of these issues, delivering instead the standard ideological verbiage about the alienation of the human mind under capitalism vs. its free development under socialism. (p.252)

Critics also noted that "although Leontiev had declared that human psychology should be understood in terms of practical activity, he actually identified it as a system of social meanings. But in Marxist parlance, social meanings belong to the sphere of social consciousness," rather than that of social practice on which Leontiev promised to build his theory" (p.252).

Nevertheless, activity theory prospered from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Leontiev became (for a time) Vygotsky's official interpreter, even claiming in a 1956 forward to a Vygotsky collection that "the emphasis on semiotic mediation was transitory for Vygotsky and that the activity theory furthered the development of what was authentic in the cultural-historical school" (p.253). But Leontiev's theory began to be scrutinized in the late 1970s. Kozulin notes several possible reasons (omitting one good reason, which is that Leontiev died in 1979). One is that Vygotsky's Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology was circulating in manuscript form and was finally published in 1982; it noted the same trap that AT had fallen into, which was that the same notion was being used as both an explanatory principle and a phenomenon to investigate (p.253). At a 1979 symposium on Vygotsky's theoretical legacy, G.P. Schedrovitsky argued that "the activity theory substantially deviated from Vygotsky's original program" and that "the principle of semiotic mediation is the cornerstone of cultural-historical theory" (p.254).

This book is 272 pages, not including footnotes. But as you can tell, it's full of details that will be interesting to those who want to know more about Vygotsky and his legacy. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Thought and Language, 2ed

Thought and Language - Revised Edition
By Lev Vygotsky

I've reviewed this classic book before, of course. But that review was of the 1962 edition. In that review, I say that I'll have to "soon" go to the library and pick up the revised (1986) edition. Now, ten years later, I finally have. The irony is that I just discovered that there's a 2012 edition of Thought and Language, which I'm sure I'll get to by 2025.

The 1962 edition, published in the US at the height of the Cold War, cut out some of the Marxist bits of Vygotsky's work. They're back in this edition, along with an excellent introduction by editor Alex Kozulin. In fact, I'll spend the first half of my review discussing it.

Kozulin provides context for Vygotsky's work, ideology, and ideological constraints, and recounts the history of this book in particular. I was particularly interested in the early 1930s, when Stalin was tightening control and "Soviet psychologists were expected to derive psychological categories directly from the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin." Although Vygotsky genuinely wanted to found a Soviet psychology on Marxist principles, he also drew on European and American research, and that research was now labeled bourgeois and anti-Marxist. Similarly, Luria's cross-cultural research was severely criticized, and he had to renounce psychoanalysis; these constraints are probably what led him to pivot to neuropsychology (p.xliii). Leontiev had to resign from the Academy of Communist Education, although his official biography does not elaborate why (p.xliv).

Also in the 1930s, a group of Vygotsky's students (including Leontiev, Zaporozhets, and Bozhovich) established a program in developmental psychology in Kharkov, Ukraine. Their proposed solution to the relation between consciousness and activity was: "'The development of the consciousness of a child occurs as a result of the development of the system of psychological operations, which, in their turn, are determined by the actual relations between the child and reality'" (p.xliv). The obvious weak point is "actual relations with reality," which became a major point of disagreement between the Kharkovites and Vygotsky (p.xlv). The Kharkovites played down the role of signs as chief mediators. As Kolulin adds, "This is an attack not on a peripheral, but on a central notion of the cultural-historical theory [of Vygotsky]" (p.xlvi). As Zinchenko argued, "'social development cannot be reduced to the history of the development of culture.'" But here we find a flaw in activity theory:

While in Vygotsky's theory, activity as a general explanatory principle finds its concretization in the specific, culturally bound types of semiotic mediation, in the doctrine of the Kharkovites, activity assumes a double role: as a general principle and as a concrete mechanism of mediation. However, in order to be socially meaningful, the concrete actions have to be connected in some way with human social and economic relations with reality. The task of elaborating this overall structure of activity was taken up by Leontiev. (p.xlviii, my emphasis)

Leontiev elaborated the structure of activity, but when discussing human activity in general, he used categories of Marxist social philosophy that

apply to the social-historical subject, rather than to the psychological individual. At the same time, 'actual relations with reality' were sought by Leontiev in the concrete practical actions and operations of the individual. The intermediate link between these two facets of activity—which Vygotsky identified as culture in general and the semiotic system in particular—had been lost because of the rejection of Vygotsky's position. (p.l)

"Rejecting semiotic mediation, and insisting on the dominant role of practical actions, the Kharkovites had obliged themselves to elaborate the connection between the philosophical categories of production and objectification and the psychological category of action" (p.l) Leontiev eventually substituted "meaning and sense" for internalized operations, "unwittingly" acknowledging Vygotsky's approach (p.l), but critics caught his inconsistency (p.li).

In the late 1950s, Vygotsky was rehabilitated during de-Stalinization. He was reprinted and read. Former Kharkovites had gained solid positions. In 1963, Leontiev's Problems of the Development of Mind won the Lenin Prize, and Leontiev took on the mantle of Vygotsky's chief interpreter (pp.li-lii). Vygotsky began to be seen as the predecessor of Leontiev, whose research program was portrayed as the "authentic realization" of Vygotsky's work (p.li).

But in the late 1970s, Leontiev's theory came under scrutiny on the grounds that Vygotsky had critiqued it: "using the notion of activity at one and the same time as an explanatory principle and as a subject of concrete psychological study. By 'explaining' the phenomena of activity by means of the principle of activity, a vicious circle was created" (p.lii). Kozulin paraphrases Yudin: "structural elements of activity (activity-action-operation and motive-goal-condition) once suggested as the elaboration of the explanatory principle, were later used in the context of the subject of study" (p.liii).

So there's Kozulin's fascinating introduction. Now to the book itself. Since this is a revised edition, rather than thoroughly covering the entire book, I'll note some things that caught me on this reading.

One is the impact of Marx and Engels. I think many of these references were cut out of the 1962 edition, but they are frequent in this one. As in the essays of the Vygotsky Reader, these essays read human and prehuman history through Engels in particular (e.g., p.90). Similarly, Vygotsky explicitly grounds his methods in Engelsian dialectics (e.g., pp.124-125).

More broadly, the impact of Soviet ideology is clearly seen. For instance, in Ch.6, Vygotsky uses examples of students "correctly" finishing sentences in social science subjects, sentences that are ideologically charged (and, to my mind, dubious) such as "Planned economy is possible in the U.S.S.R. because there is no private property—all land, factories, and plants belong to the workers and peasants" (p.191). Examples such as these, at the time when the Soviet Union was becoming inexorably more unfree, are jolting reminders that Vygotsky had to work within a sharply limited set of ideological parameters.

Do I need to say it? The book is still a classic, and Kozulin's introduction adds much to my understanding of it. Definitely pick it up.

Reading :: Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies

Revisionist Revolution in Vygotsky Studies: The State of the Art
Edited by Anton Yasnitsky and Rene Van der Veer

In his foreword, Alex Kozulin—himself no stranger to controversy in Vygotsky studies—warns:

The book in front of us is provocative, one may say deliberately provocative. The authors basically claim that almost all we have read about Lev Vygotsky and his theory is a result of hero worshipping resulting in the cult of Vygotsky. The aim of the authors is to debunk this cult and weed out numerous historical and textual mistakes associated with the "Vygotskian narrative." (p.xii)

 That's a pretty good summary of the thrust of the book. All but two of the chapters are authored or coauthored by Anton Yasnitsky, whose work I ran across a couple of years ago when looking up information on the so-called Vygotsky ban. (The article I found, by Fraser and Yasnitsky, is the basis for a chapter in this collection.) Yasnitsky has published like crazy since 2008 and is listed on the back of the book as an "independent scholar."

Let's mine that Kozulin foreword a little more before diving into the chapters. Kozulin provides some background on the Soviet system, noting that "for practically the entire period described in this book there were only two places in Russia where psychology could be studied—Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg)." Thus "just by occupying the position of Head of the Department (or School) of Psychology at Moscow University, people like Sergei Rubinstein or Alexei Leontiev could exercise unprecedented control over the ways in which academic research was conducted and books or articles were selected for publication" (p.xiii). He adds that due to Stalinism, "from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, Soviet psychology was indeed intellectually isolated," and that immediately after World War II, "in parallel to a supreme cult of Stalin a system of lower-level cults was created, so that in each area of life a 'great man' was selected as an emblematic example" of his domain (p.xiii). Yet Kozulin is not convinced that the Vygotsky cult, "which definitely was not created in the 1940s," is of a piece with this system. He suggests that these tendencies had deeper roots in the French centralized intellectual system that Russia adopted even before the Revolution (pp.xiii-xiv).

In any case, Kozulin cautions, Soviet psychologists had two intellectual traditions: the written corpus, available "in print and often in a form highly distorted by the authors' self-censorship," and the oral tradition, in which "much of the discussion occurred during informal seminars conducted in the living-room or kitchen of their apartments" (p.xiv). He adds: "Sometimes the gap between these two streams was so wide that one could easily imagine them taking place in two different countries" (p.xiv).

With that introduction in mind, let's get to the chapters themselves. I have typically found edited collections to be quite uneven and insufficiently focused, but this collection is a rare one: I found something of interest in every chapter. So let's give each one subheadings.

Chapter 1: The Archetype of Soviet Psychology: From the Stalinism of the 1930s to the "Stalinist science" of our time (Anton Yasnitsky)
In this first chapter, Yasnitsky provides us with the broad sweep of Soviet psychology. He begins by noting the situation in late Imperial Russia, in which three distinct disciplines dominated: 1) speculative academic psychology, 2) empirical psychology, and 3) applied psychology (pp.3-4). There were not only enormous gaps between these three, but also fragmentation within each one (p.4).

With the Revolution, things changed. As Yasnitsky notes, in the 1920s "one of the key tasks of the post-revolutionary era was utopian 'remolding of man,' the creation of a new type of people, who will master their nature and uncover the yet unknown potential of human beings. These ideas were grounded in the pervasive post-revolutionary belief in the possibility of virtually unlimited personal growth and an active, creative attitude to the world"(p.5; cf. Bauer, Trotsky, and Vygotsky's 'The Socialist Alteration of Man'). Post-revolution, Bolsheviks wanted Soviet psychology to be practical and Marxist, remolding the "old man" of capitalism into the "new man" of Communism (p.6). "Lavishly supported by the Bolshevik leadership, work was done on creating a pragmatic interdisciplinary synthesis of scientific-practical interventions and a higher-level theoretical paradigm that would encompass all human sciences and bring about a universal framework in which disciplines at different levels and from different spheres of application would work together as a complex, based on a shared methodological and philosophical foundation" (p.7). New schools sprang up in psychology as well as the other sciences. In addition, new disciplines (such as pedology and defectology) sprang up, although these tended to overlap in both subject and spokespeople (p.8).

But the end of the 1920s saw Stalin's "Great Break," which naturally affected all spheres of life in the USSR (p.7). In the 1930s, the whole rhythm of society changed, and central planning became more pronounced (p.8). "Nomadic quotes," which signaled loyalty to science sponsors and political leadership, appeared on the first pages of publications (p.9). The Stalinist model of national science emerged, "the hybrid of state, Party, and science" (p.9).

By the mid-1930s, the proliferation of "revolutionary disciplines—such as pedology and defectology—was considered redundant. The disciplinary purge of the 1930s thinned them out, with pedologists taking their work to education and defectologists retreating to medicine. "The winner in the inter-disciplinary struggle for survival" was psychology (p.10).

Yasnitky argues that we can discern two distinct generations of Soviet psychology. The first generation was born in the 1890s and educated pre-Revolution in German-style gimnazia, consequently learning at least French and German. They were intellectuals and "remained for a while in the somewhat ambiguous position of Bolshevik sympathizers" although they came from bourgeois backgrounds. Fortunately for them, in 1936 Stalin invented the category of "toiling intelligentsia," providing a legitimate stratum for these people to occupy (p.12). Subsequently, a small number from this generation dominated the higher reaches of psychology. For instance, "virtually all administrative power and control over national psychology in the 1940s was in the hands of" Rubinshtein—until he was accused of cosmopolitanism in 1949 and deposed from his supervisory and administrative positions (p.13).

The second generation was born in the 1920s-30s. They went through high school during World War II, and their education was "characterized by deprivation and continuous disruption," including poor foreign language instruction. Their graduate work happened in the late Stalinist postwar period. This generation dominated psychology through the early 2000s (p.14). Yasnitsky notes that Toulmin discerned this gap and its effects in his 1978 article on Vygotsky (p.15).

Yasnitsky argues that Soviet psychology had these characteristics:

1. Centralization and control (pp.16-18)
2. Cliquism and patronage (pp.18-19)
3. Ritualism (pp.19-21)
4. Gap between theory and practice. Different frameworks dominated at different times: Pavlov (1950s-early 60s), Leontiev's activity approach (mid 60s-early 70s), and Lomov's systemic approach (mid 70s-1980s) (p.21), but these dominant frameworks were mainly applied as nomadic quotes "mainly belonging to the rhetorical space" (p.22; cf. Cole's afterword to Luria's autobiography). 
5. Intellectual and linguistic isolation (pp.22-23)
6. Cultism and hagiographies. This tendency included portraying a small number of great figures, characterized as good or evil, and often playing the roles of martyrs or victims (p.24). 

Yasnitsky further argues that the Vygotsky "cult" is an example of the last point. In opposition, he argues for a critical revisionism in which we holistically evaluate the record (instead of characterizing Vygotsky as a Great Man); carefully reconstruct the texts; compare histories; and devictimize and deheroize Vygotsky and his followers (p.25). 

Chapter 2. Unity in diversity: The Vygotsky-Luria circle as an informal personal network of scholars (Anton Yasnitsky)

"During his lifetime Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) failed to establish himself as the leader of an institutionalized scientific school in the human sciences associated with his name" (p.27). Vygotsky failed—in making this bald statement, Yasnitsky is signaling that he won't be pulling his punches. He notes that the Vygotsky historiography began with his obituaries (by Luria and Leontiev), but the "school of Vygotsky" narrative—he says—emerged in the 1970s-80s around the time that Luria and Leontiev died, penned by their followers and students (pp.27-28). These, he says, were hagiographic—it's improper to speak ill of the dead, after all. But during perestroika, this collective hagiographic account was challenged—specifically claims that Leontiev functioned "as leader of the school of Vygotskian scholars" and that "Leontiev's 'activity theory' was a direct continuation of Vygotsky's theory of cultural development" (p.29). 

This chapter seems to be based on Yasnitsky's dissertation, which I haven't yet read. Here, he cites Anna Stetsenko's (2004) article on the Vygotsky Circle as a collaboration (p.30), then takes up the task of mapping the personal networks of Vygotsky collaborators (p.31). He notes that there is no contemporary evidence of a troika (Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev), but plenty of evidence for a Vygotsky-Luria partnership (p.31). Vygotsky and Luria worked closely, coauthored texts, and even studied for medical exams together in fall 1931 (p.32). 

Yasnitsky breaks down the history of the Vygotsky-Luria network in the following way:

Phase 1: 1924-1927. Vygotsky moves from Gomel' to Moscow, receives his doctoral degree (without a defense—he spent much of 1925-26 in the hospital), and begins coauthoring pieces with Luria. He also works with colleagues and graduate students (pp.32-33). He also makes contacts with defectologists. He is uninterested in Luria and Leontiev's work with Luria's combined motor method (p.34). At this point, the works do not appear to add up to a unified research program; Vygotsky is searching for a research method and theoretical foundation (p.35). 

Phase 2: 1927-1931. Vygotsky and Luria form a circle, including coworkers and like-minded individuals, communicating frequently with them informally (p.35). This circle includes scholars working in defectology, clinical and medical studies, and child studies (p.36). Leontiev is included in the latter category, but is not understood as a central member of this network. 

Phase 3: 1931-1934. In this period, several members of the extended circle are working at different institutions—Moscow, Kharkov, Leningrad—coordinated by Vygotsky and Luria (p.39). The circle still includes scholars working in defectology, clinical and medical studies, and child studies, but now these scholars are spread across the three cities (p.40). In addition, these collaborators in the early 1930s include several former students of Kurt Lewin (p.40). Also in this period, Vygotsky attempted to organize the psychology department at VIEM in Moscow, but died in June 1934 before this work could be completed (p.41). 

Phase 4: 1934-1936. At this point, Luria and Leontiev both return to Moscow in 1934 to take supervisory positions (p.41). A "pile" of Vygotsky's books are published in 1934-1936 due to the efforts of his students and collaborators (p.43). Luria is still in the center of the circle (p.42). 

Phase 5: 1936-1941. In this phase, the July 4, 1936 Pedology Decree launched a number of other criticisms, including Rudneva's January 1937 condemnation of Vygotsky and some of his collaborators—Luria and Leontiev are named. Based on fragmentary evidence, Yasnitsky believes that Luria and Leontiev both quit their jobs in 1936-1937 (p.46). Luria may have relied on his father's connections as well as his own connections—including someone with whom he had collaborated during his criminal studies of the 1920s. Leontiev wrote a critique of Vygotsky that he probably delivered in 1937. Through these actions and other connections, they weathered the criticism and in 1939 they gained supervisory positions in Moscow and Leningrad (p.46). "It is clear that from the end of the 1930s onward only those individuals who thoroughly understood the real meaning of Soviet science policy and the internal mechanics of decision-making in the country could make scientific careers in the Soviet Union" (p.47). 

Leontiev defends his dissertation in 1940; Rubinstein is on the committee (p.47). Luria joins the Communist Party in 1943 and Leontiev follows in 1948. And the two form the new center of their own network (p.48). 

Chapter 3. Deconstructing Vygotsky's victimization narrative: A re-examination of the "Stalinist suppression" of Vygotskian theory (Jennifer Fraser and Anton Yasnitsky)

This chapter is a version of Fraser and Yasnitsky's article. Here, they discuss the frequently told story of a ban on Vygotsky's work from 1936-1956—a story that is repeated by Jerome Bruner in his foreword to 1962's Thought and language (p.51), Wertsch's 1985 The social formation of mind (p.53), and Joravsky's 1987 article (pp.53-54). None of these are well sourced. The authors suggest that the story comes not from the written scholarship but from the oral tradition surrounding Vygotsky, an oral tradition associated with the inner circle of Vygotskians (p.55). 

The authors give us many reasons to doubt a "Vygotsky ban" beyond the lack of documentation. After Trotsky was exiled in 1929, he was put under a publication ban in 1932; but no such ban or mention by Stalin has been documented for Vygotsky (p.59). 

Perhaps a ban had to do with the fact that Vygotsky cited Trotsky a lot in the mid-1920s, before he was exiled? In later reprintings of Vygotsky's works, censors often simply deleted the quotation marks around these passages or deleted the cites themselves; sometimes they withheld the publications themselves (p.61). But this didn't seem to constitute a ban per se.

Perhaps it had to do with Vygotsky's work in pedology, a field that was banned in 1936? Stalin supposedly found that his son had been judged mentally deficient by a pedologist—and 14% of 7-13 year olds in Leningrad were held back a year in 1935-1936 (p.64). Furthermore, pedology was judged incompatible with the emerging New Soviet Man due to its claims of hereditary and environmental causes (p.64). But after the ban, pedologists just flowed to the field of pedological practices (p.65). Still, pedological books were under an implied ban, and Vygotsky had written pedology textbooks (p.65).

Yet "the late 1930s saw Vygotsky venerated within the Soviet Union"—"his name and theories were referenced (and celebrated) at various times within influential texts during the period 1936-55" (p.65).

Was there a ban? Fraser and Yasnitsky suggest that perhaps there was a de facto ban, but not on the part of the USSR. They note that a multi-volume collection of Vygotsky's works came out in 1956 due to the efforts of his family, not his associates; Luria and Leontiev did not make efforts to have his works republished; and the collected works of Vygotsky did not come out until after their deaths (pp.68-69). They cite Zinchenko's claim that "Leontiev kept deliberately finding numerous excuses for not writing" the introductory chapter required by the first volume (p.69)!

This story is great gossip and works well with Kozulin's claim of a Leontiev-Vygotsky rift. But it seems like thin evidence, and I'd treat it with caution.

Chapter 4. Vygotsky the published: Who wrote Vygotsky and what Vygotsky actually wrote (Rene van der Veer and Anton Yasnitsky)
Here, the authors put Vygotsky's works in context. Almost half of them were not scholarly or substantial (p.78). Even Thinking and speech is more of a compilation than a monograph—the earliest part of the book was written in 1928, with most of the rest being written in 1934. Vygotsky had a period of self-criticism in between! (pp.79-80). They provide a useful table (p.80) breaking down the chapters, their authorship dates, and their original publication dates. (The chapters include a book review; a portion of an undergraduate textbook; and three book introductions.)

Which publications were most important to Vygotsky? They attempt to find out by looking at three separate documents that Vygotsky put together. (One was for a job interview) (pp.81-82). They also looked at his private correspondence (pp.83-84). Interestingly, this correspondence suggests that Vygotsky planned to publish Studies on the psychology of behavior in December 1927; by July 1929, he was not enthusiastic about the project (p.84). In fact, he underwent a deep crisis in 1929, realizing that some foundational concepts were no longer satisfactory (p.85). By the end of 1932, he lamented that "'we focused attention on the sign (on the tool) to the detriment of the operation with it'" (quoted on p.86). From 1932-1934, Vygotsky studied pathology in medical settings (p.87).

The authors also look at Vygotsky's abandoned works, including his manuscript on the crisis in psychology. Most of the ideas in this manuscript were published in other publications during his lifetime (p.91).

So what were Vygotsky's most important works? The authors list:

1. The psychology of art (his unpublished 1925-26 dissertation)
2. Pedagogical psychology (his 1926 textbook)
3. The pedology of school age (his 1928 textbook)
4. Imagination and creativity in children (a 1930 popular booklet)
5. Studies on the history of behavior (1930, written with Luria)
6. Pedology of the adolescent (his textbook in three volumes: 1929, 1930, 1931)

The authors note that four of these and partially a fifth are popular science books, written for the money—including the book he coauthored with Luria. They also might illustrate Vygotsky's instrumental period, since they were mainly written before 1930 (p.92). The authors suggest supplementing this list with

1. Thinking and speech (1934)
2. Foundations of pedology (his 1934/5 textbook)
3. Mental development of children in the process of learning and instruction (1935)
4. The mentally retarded child (1935)

Chapter 5. Vygotsky the unpublished: An overview of the personal archive (1912-1934) (Ekaterina Zavershneva)

This is one of the only two chapters in this collection that Yasnitsky did not author or coauthor. Here, the author examines Vygotsky's personal archives: "the notebooks, scientific diaries, and scattered notes, which until the early 2000s remained practically untouched" (p.94). She was able to identify several unpublished manuscripts as well as reconstruct the full, uncensored manuscript on the crisis in psychology (Vygotsky cited Trotsky, Bukharin, and Radek) (p.95). 

The entire chapter is worth reading, but I'll focus on a few things. One is that in 1933-34 Vygotsky created the concept of the cooperation of nature and culture, which precludes the notion of unlimited development that he had embraced in 1929-30 (p.105). Another is two letters from Kornilov, from 1925 and 1926. The 1925 letter praises Vygotsky's dissertation and suggesting that they forego a public defense of it due to Vygotsky's stay in the hospital (pp.106-107). 

Zavershneva notes that in 1930, Vygotsky advanced the system principle; in 1932, this principle led to "the appearance of a new theory of consciousness as a dynamic semantic system" (p.107). Based on this new theory, Vygotsky submitted himself and his colleagues to criticism, and along the way, intensified polemic with Leontiev (p.107). He complained that they had focused too much on the sign (tool) and not enough on the development of the operation with the sign (p.112). He also rejected Leontiev's criticism that his focus was just on speech (p.112). 

They did not agree in their theoretical assessment of the processes involved in the transition from speech to thought. ... Speech, [Vygotsky] said, participates as actively in this transition as thought itself; we should not present it as a picture, a cast, a sort of death-mask made of the living process of thinking. The role of speech is not just to fixate the thought or what remained of it after the translation of the thought into a tangible form; the word is not just the main carrier of the thought, its canvas, but also the carrier of consciousness as a whole. Leontiev insisted on the investigation of the practical action as the central theme, but Vygotsky did not agree: the dynamics of the action derive from the dynamics of meaning and in itself, separate from the 'peak' dimension of meanings, cannot be analyzed. (p.112)

Zavershneva adds that "the polemic between them became increasingly pungent," e.g. in an October 1932 notebook (p.112). "We will not analyze this polemic in any detail, but it remains a fact that Leontiev from the early 1930s distanced himself from the study of consciousness as proposed by Vygotsky, although he continued participating in the work of the Vygotsky-Luria extended group, carried out experiments, and participated in the discussion during their symposia" (pp.112-113).

In 1932, Leontiev characterizes Vygotsky as claiming that all psychology was reduced to word meaning (according to his oral biography, which Zavershneva cites; unfortunately for me, it's in Russian) (p.114).

Again, there's plenty more in this chapter, but let's leave it here for now.

Chapter 6. "The way to freedom": Vygotsky in 1932 (Ekaterina Zavershneva)
Zavershneva authors a second chapter, again drawing from her study of Vygotsky's archives. Here, she dives into "one notebook, dated October 1932, [which] stands out because it is one of the clearest and most accessible documents in the archive" (p.127).

The text consists of three parts: (1) the plan for the unwritten book On the question of the study of consciousness; (2) notes about the psychophysical problem; and (3) propositions for talks by Vygotsky's co-workers Ivan Solov'ev and Aleksei Leontiev, presumably written during an internal conference for close collaborators. In general we may say that the text marks the turn toward a new psychological theory—the theory of consciousness as a dynamic semantic system—and also shows the emerging discrepancy between the views of Vygotsky and Leontiev. (p.127)

In 1930, Vygotsky introduced the systemic structure of consciousness; in 1932, he introduced the principle of the systemic structure "and the analysis of interfunctional connections lost its leading role to the semic analysis of consciousness" (p.128). "It is remarkable that below the title of the earliest draft of the plan Vygotsky wrote the names of himself, Leontiev, and Luria. Apparently, the idea was to include them as co-authors and Vygotsky changed his mind" (p.128).

Just an aside here: Much of what I've seen about a Vygotsky-Leontiev split has tended to characterize Leontiev as errant or even as personally betraying Vygotsky. But (a) people can have disagreements, (b) it seems awfully presumptuous for Vygotsky to outline a book and put his coauthors' names on it without asking them, and (c) Leontiev had just seen Vygotsky and Luria's 1930 book criticized for being insufficiently Marxist and very well might have wanted to avoid following their path too closely!

Back to the notebook. Vygotsky evidently planned to include the famed mnemonist Shereshevskii as a case study in the book (Shereshevskii would later appear in Luria's Mind of a mnemonist) (p.129). Vygotsky also planned to discuss schizophrenia, in which speech splits from other psychological functions and the person loses the ability to verbally interact with the self—"a perfect example of the loss of the semantic structure of consciousness" (p.129).

"In contrast to his work from the 'instrumental period' of the 1920s, with its zeal for social 'reforging' and the creation of a 'new man,' Vygotsky's work from the 1930s was focused on the study of the subject's inner world. ... For him the mechanisms of social mediation were not important in themselves; rather they contained the essence of man: they served as the ladder toward the new 'peak' psychology" (p.132). Young Vygotsky had been focused on the birth of the "new man", and Zavershneva reads this focus not as following Trotsky so much as following the Zeitgeist (pp.132-133).

Skipping a bit: Vygotsky believed that "Leontiev underestimated the higher processes and showed a low level of theoretical generalization" (pp.138-139). Vygotsky believed that "the transitions between the cognizing and the practical intellect" had to be studied as part of the study of consciousness. "As soon as we understand the dynamics of meanings, we will understand all the rest as effects that follow from a cause and vice versa; separating the action from the dimension of meanings, we lose the meaning of the action, its goal-directed nature, etc." (Zavershneva's paraphrase, p.139). Vygotsky claimed that Leontiev "lacked discipline, lost the focus of the research, and ignored the systemic principle"—he was backsliding, returning to the functional analysis that Vygotsky had left behind in 1930 (p.139).

But Leontiev's approach allowed him to make his career between 1930-1950. Zavershneva archly notes that except for the 1956 collection, Vygotsky's works were not made available until after Leontiev's death (p.139).

Chapter 7. Translating Vygotsky: Some problems of transnational Vygotskian science (Rene van der Veer and Anton Yasnitsky)
Van der Veer's sometime collaborator Jaan Valsiner has examined problems in English translations of Vygotsky, as has Nikolai Veresov. Here, the authors review some of these problems as well as adding others.

Interestingly, they point out that Leontiev in 1954 was concerned about the rehabilitation of Vygotsky, so he approached a French scholar about publishing some of Vygotsky's articles in French—a way to speed up publication at home. The effort did not pay off, but a volume of Vygotsky's works was published in Russian in 1956 (p.146). In fact, the authors include an anecdote in which prominent Soviet psychologists (including Leontiev and Luria) gave an interview to a French journalist to get their message out, then corrected "mistakes" in Russian (p.148).

The authors then turn to the question of translation errors. They describe six categories:

1. inaccuracies
2. suppression of terms or passages
3. suppression of names
4. unidentified or suppressed citations
5. insertions
6. multiple retranslations (p.162)

Under unidentified/suppressed citations, the authors note citations of Trotsky (p.167).

Under multiple retranslations, the authors tell a fascinating and unsettling story. In the late 1960s/early 1970s, Luria gave Michael Cole a typewritten English translation of "Tool and sign," which he and Vygotsky had authored sometime around 1930. Cole created a "cut-and-paste" version of it for Mind in Society (1978).  In 1984, an "apparently complete version" came out in Russian. In 1994, Luria's typewritten English translation was published in The Vygotsky Reader. But the editors, Van der Veer & Valsiner, compared the English and Russian versions and discovered that the Russian version "missed several important pieces (such as illustrations) but was nevertheless longer," and "it contained a number of non-verbatim—but semantically identical—repetitions of text fragments! The editors referred to rumors that the Russian text, as strange as might look, was in fact translated from English" (p.169, my emphasis).

But it gets stranger. In 2005, a former student of Luria claimed that he had participated in a "benign forgery" of the text (p.169). According to him, in the late 1960s, Luria "invited him to participate in the preparation of the collected works of Vygotsky." Luria explained that they couldn't find Vygotsky's original manuscript. Would he translate this English version? "Apparently, this English translation survived and was subsequently handed from Luria to Cole, and then, by the latter, to Van der Veer and Valsiner" (p.170). But the authors argue that the repetitions of passages were due to a second translator who translated parts of the same passages. Then the whole thing was put together by the editor of the Russian Vygotsky collection (p.170).

One final twist. In 1999, the final volume of the six-volume Vygotsky collection in English was published. In it was "Tool and sign," which had been translated from the Russian text that in turn had been translated from the English text that Luria had presumably prepared from the original manuscript (p.170).

Chapter 8. Did Uzbeks have illusions? The Luria-Koffka controversy of 1932 (Eli Lamdan and Anton Yasnitsky)
Famously, Luria sent Vygotsky a telegram during his expedition to Central Asia, reporting on his psychological testing: "The Uzbeks have no illusions!" Supposedly this was a dangerous telegram. Yet, the authors note, there is no documentary proof that such a telegram existed—it's a good story, but an undocumented one (p.175).

The story also suggests that the study was suppressed for political reasons until the early 1970s, when Luria took the manuscript out of a drawer and published it (p.176). Yet, the authors suggest, there may have been much more to this story. They note that Luria published an English-language account of the expedition in 1934, apparently coauthored by an uncredited Kurt Koffka (p.176). This manuscript suggests that Koffka came away with an entirely different reading (p.177). Koffka essentially argued that Uzbeks who did not regard the test as a test of their abilities saw the illusions; those who were suspicious looked at the patterns longer before making their judgments (p.187). Based on Vygotsky and Luria's correspondence, they learned of Koffka's conclusions immediately once his article was published (p.187).

Luria and Vygotsky evidently saw the findings as proof that the Uzbeks were being transformed into the New Men of the Soviet state, despite their limitations (p.191). But in a Soviet Union trying to integrate its ethnic minorities, the findings suggested chauvinism—primitive people being lifted by more advanced ones (p.191). More than that, the propagandist "victory" of the Soviet experiment, declared at the XVII Congress of the Party in January/February 1934, killed hopes of the publication (p.193).

Why? The authors argue that Luria and Vygotsky had a vulgar Marxist understanding in which the relations of production determine psychological makeup (p.194). That is, they embraced economic determinism—which became seriously out of tune with the understanding of the Party (p.195).

One other question: Why were Uzbeks suspicious? We could read between the lines in Luria's own account of the expedition, but the authors add that the region had experienced rebellions and unrest shortly before Luria's expedition and "the arrival of a large group of Soviet officials and international researchers accompanied by a convoy of secret police forces was perceived as an utterly alarming and even potentially life-threatening experience by the local populations" (p.199). Luria seemed oblivious to the potential effects on his research, which sounds like Luria, all right.

Chapter 9. A transnational history of "the beginning of a beautiful friendship" The birth of the cultural-historical Gestalt psychology of Alexander Luria, Kurt Lewin, Lev Vygotsky, and others (Anton Yasnitsky)
Here, Yasnitsky notes the many connections between the Vygotsky-Luria Circle and Kurt Lewin, the Gestalt psychologist. Lewin influenced Vygotsky during his last period (p.203) and many of Lewin's students went on to study with Vygotsky, Luria, and Leontiev.

The most startling claim here, unfortunately quite underdeveloped, is that "the 'Vygotskian-Lewinian' trend in Soviet psychology—although preserved in some very general sense—was considerably mutated and transformed" and "The mutant and hybrid that emerged as a result of all these transformations" was ... activity theory (p.225).

There's one more chapter, the Epilogue, but let's skip it. I do want to point out Appendix A, a bibliography of all Vygotsky's known published works.

So—that's a long review. But it could have been much longer. This book was fascinating, thought-provoking, and worth mining if you're interested in Vygotsky or his colleagues. As noted, I am still cautious of some of its claims. And reading parts, especially the chapters on the archives, has led me to think about the Vygotsky-Leontiev relationship in directions that the authors may not have expected. But overall, I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Self-Regulation and Autonomy

Self-Regulation and Autonomy: Social and Developmental Dimensions of Human Conduct
Edited by Brian W. Sokol, Frederick M.E. Grouzet, and Ulrich Müller

Although I'm calling this a "book review," I'm really just going to discuss one chapter: Challis J.E. Kinnucan and Janet E. Kubli's "Understanding Explanatory Talk through Vygotsky's Theory of Self-Regulation."

In this chapter, the authors are specifically interested in explanatory talk and "explanatory competence": "Indeed, it has been said that individuals' everyday cognitive functioning might be impossible without explanations," the authors add, citing Keil & Wilson (1998) (p.231). The authors "consider explanatory talk as one aspect of children's developing capacities for self-regulation" (p.231) and "ground our discussion of self-regulation and explanatory skills in a sociocultural perspective" (pp.231-232).

As readers of this blog know, self-regulation—typically termed "self-mastery"—is a major theme in Vygotsky's works, and self-talk is for Vygotsky a critical pathway for achieving it. The authors draw from sociocultural researchers such as Diaz & colleagues and Daniels, Cole & Wertsch to ground their discussion of "the development of self-regulation as an outcome of both social and individual processes" (p.232).

Self-regulatory processes as higher mental functions. The authors first discuss self-regulatory processes as higher mental functions (here, we'll call them HMFs), drawing on Mind in Society (which itself incorporates a part from Vygotsky's History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions) as well as commentary by Meshcheryakov to define HMFs as

guid[ing] and controll[ing] both thought and action and distanc[ing] humans from the control of environmental stimuli. Ultimately, the operation of higher mental processes yielded self-regulated action and adaptation. In Vygotsky's theory, the key process that produces higher mental functioning, or regulatory skill, is internalization. Internalization is both a developmental outcome and the primary mechanism by which interpersonal activity (e.g., dialogue, shared practices and strategies) is transformed into inner, self-regulating thought processes. (p.233)

HMFs contrast with lower mental functions (LMFs), which have developed "along a strong biologically based trajectory and included what cognitive scientists today classify as basic sensory, perceptual, attentional, and memory processes" (p.233). The HMFs, according to Vygotsky, were uniquely human. "Among higher mental processes, Vygotsky included voluntary attention and sustained concentration, concept formation, planning, and problem solving. In Ferryhough's (2010) view, components of executive function and forms of regulatory behavior are contemporary examples of what Vygotsky categorized as higher mental processes" (p.233).

(Note that Vygotsky's work on HMFs, described here, was subsumed by his later work on psychological systems — see chapter 6 in the linked review. Here, Vygotsky argued that the mental functions remain more or less the same, but their relationships change. That is, things that were counted as HMFs are actually effects of relationships or "constellations" of lower mental functions. I see an analogy to how neuropsychologists now regard executive functions as constructs for describing emerging relationships among neurological functions.) 

The authors add that "among Vygotsky's most powerful insights as that sociocultural processes forged new intermental or interfunctional links among higher mental functions" (p.234).

Mediation of self-regulated thinking and behavior. The authors then turn to the question of mediation, drawing on Wertsch (p.235). They add that "Kozulin (2002) warned that the full range of mediational social interactions is still not fully grasped," in part because of "its necessarily context-specific nature" (p.236). Kozulin proposed "distinguishing between type of social mediation and the particular mediating techniques used by adults with children" (pp.236-237): types include scaffolding, approval, and encouragement, while techniques include localized implementation of each type (p.237).

The authors note that for Vygotsky, "self-regulative uses of external speech were ... the earliest manifestations of inner speech" (p.239), and cite Diaz in asserting that "private speech gradually 'takes on a planning and guiding function'" (p.239).

Developing explanatory competence. The authors then review the contemporary research on explanatory competence "with the aim of illustrating Vygotsky's ideas about the gradual shift from externally to internally mediated forms of self-regulated thought" (p.240).

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, I actually only read this one chapter in depth, so I can't review this book as a whole. But this chapter was really useful for me in thinking through how Vygotsky's contributions have been, and can be, taken up. Specifically, it allowed me to better consider how Vygotsky's "self-mastery" relates to contemporary considerations of self-regulation and to the construct of executive functions. And, more broadly, it allowed me once again to consider how Vygotsky's assertions interacted with his political milieu and ideology: self-mastery was, after all, a huge theme for Engelsian dialectics and a hallmark of humanity. In contemporary neuropsychology, self-regulation is understood as important but, I think, not absolutely central.

In any case, if you are interested in how Vygotsky's work can be taken up in contemporary neuropsychological discourse about self-regulation, check out this chapter.

Reading :: Vygotsky: Philosophy and Education

Vygotsky: Philosophy and Education

By Jan Derry

This book was recommended to me by another scholar, who suggested that I needed to better understand Hegel's influence on Vygotsky. True. I have been avoiding reading Hegel. Fortunately Jan Derry has done some of the hard work on this question already.

Derry's first sentence is: "This book is a response to the claim that Vygotsky holds abstract rationality as the pinnacle of thought" (p.1). Throughout the book, Derry explores how Vygotsky understands rationality, contrasting that understanding with how Vygotsky has been taken up by others, comparing Vygotsky's thought to situated cognition (Ch.2), and constructivism (Ch.3), Piaget (Ch.4). She then explores roots of Vygotsky's thought in Spinoza (Ch.5) and Hegel (Ch.6-7).

A few quick notes from the early part of this book:

In Chapter 2,

• Derry sketches the evolution of the Vygotsky school, drawing on Kozulin to discuss the split between Vygotsky's more "complex" view vs. the Kharkovites (p.12)
• She mentions, drawing again on Kozulin, that Vygotsky's "followers ... were inevitably compromised by the difficult conditions of Stalinism," leading to the activity approach, which was "a more 'materialist' approach [that] occurred in a climate of terror that had become life-threatening" (p.13, quoting Zinchenko here).
• Specifically, the Kharkov school moved from the study of consciousness to that of object-orientedness (p.13)
• Derry quotes Zinchenko, who said that in the context of Stalinism, symbols were deemed idealistic, whereas "the thing" was materialist (p.13); one was unsafe to study, the other was safe.
• Critically, Zinchenko says, activity was reduced to the understanding that a human being was a functional organ for carrying out the Soviet state's directives (p.14).

In Chapter 3, Derry criticizes Wertsch for not understanding Vygotsky because he didn't appreciate Vygotsky's grounding in Hegel (a lack that I share, which is why I read Derry's book!). Specifically, "Although Hegel offers a radically different appreciation of 'abstract rationality,' that is lost to much contemporary work, owing in part to the alignment of Hegel with Marxism and Marxism with the failures of Soviet practice" (p.35). She also criticizes the North American approach more broadly as representationalist, understanding meaning as representing something that exists out there (p.39-42), rather than being created through human agency; if we subscribe to a representationalist paradigm, she says, "agency can be and is ascribed to anything that appears to exert effect" (p.42, in a passage that calls out Wertsch's discussion of tools but can be applied to posthumanism as well). 

In Chapter 4, Derry explores the underlying philosophical differences between Vygotsky and Piaget, arguing that Piaget worked within a dualist Kantian framework (p.71) while Vygotsky worked within a monist Hegelian framework (p.75). 

In Chapter 5, Derry argues that "Vygotsky's understanding of free will derives from Spinoza" (p.85). "Freedom and necessity are at the heart of Vygotsky's account of how mindedness is formed and sustained by mediation with artefacts in a social domain" (p.86). And "Vygotsky follows Spinoza in taking the basis of freedom to be the human ability to separate ourselves from our passions, from the contingencies of nature, and to make for ourselves a space within which we can determine our actions" (p.90). 

Later in the chapter, Derry returns to the Vygotsky/Kharkov split, arguing that 

The idea of economic determinism is fostered by a crude reading of Marx, where a determinate relation is taken to exist in what became known as the base and superstructure model. The temptation is then to see human beings simply as a product of their circumstances. This determinism plagued Vygotskians: It was precisely this that provoked the rift with Leontiev and the Kharkov group because they could not accept Vygotsky's insistence on the existence of a plane that was not explicable in terms of tool use in an environment. (p.97)

I'm not all-in on the first part of this interpretation: Lamdan and Yasnitky make a pretty good case that Vygotsky and Luria had themselves subscribed to economic determinism in the Uzbek expedition. But I agree that the Kharkov group collapsed the Vygotskian distinction between physical tools and psychological tools (signs). 

In any case, Derry notes that a rapprochement could occur only when orthodox Stalinist concepts developed that would make it possible: "only when Vygotskian theory was reinstated in the language of the second signal system of Pavlov. The second signal system incorporates the notion that language and concepts mediate human existence as a second signal system rather than as a first signal where stimuli act on the nervous system directly" (p.98; for examples, see my reviews of Simon, Cole & Maltzman, and especially Luria). 

In Chapter 6, Derry finally turns her attention to "the most significant philosopher for Vygotsky—Hegel" (p.105). "Hegel's philosophy is not readily accessible," she adds with some understatement (p.105). To lead us through it, she contrasts Kant and Hegel:

1. Kant believed in an unknowable realm; Hegel believed that everything was knowable.
2. Kant believed that the mind in itself could construct the world in a particular way; Hegel believed that the mind emerges in social activity.
3. Kant emphasized representations corresponding to a world of which we have knowledge; Hegel emphasized "meaning arising inferentially within a system" (p.106).

Based on Hegel, Vygotsky understood forms of knowing as "developed from activity rather than linking the categories of understanding" (p.108). He also argued that words and concepts "do not merely reflect but actually structure thought. Concepts do not follow, but actually precede, thought" (p.112). Indeed, "Under the influence of Hegel, Vygotsky is bound to reject the representationalist view of knowledge, which presupposes a terminus where knowledge is complete" (p.116). 

In Chapter 7, Derry considers Vygotsky, Hegel, and education. Here, she emphasizes that Vygotsky's views were not "the caricature of evolutionism mistakenly attributed to both Hegel and Marx" (p.135). I won't go further into this chapter, but it is illuminating.

Overall, this book really helped me to understand Hegel (and Spinoza, and Kant) in relation to Vygotsky's thinking. If that's something you want to do also, definitely pick this book up.

Reading :: Vygotsky in Perspective

Vygotsky in Perspective
By Ronald Miller

This book has been reviewed positively by various luminaries in Vygotsky studies, some of whose works have in turn been reviewed on this blog: Kozulin and Valsiner. Yasnitsky calls it an "absolute and unconditional treasure." But reading through the reviews, you'll also see keywords such as "contrarian" and "deeply argumentative."

I agree that the book does have some strong positives. But it's also one of the most uncharitable scholarly books I have ever read. Miller, who is a professor emeritus, notes that he is writing at the end of his career, so he can say what he thinks without fear of reprisal (p.xii). And what he thinks is that various luminaries who have grounded their work in Vygotsky are either fools or knaves, substituting their dross of Americanized psychological theory for Vygotsky's gold—and obscuring the plain meaning of Vygotsky's texts. In fact, two lietmotifs show up across the text:

• X falls headlong into a trap.
• X mischaracterizes Vygotsky—"inadvertently, perhaps," Miller allows during his most graceful moments (ex: p.347).

Various Westerners come in for sustained and dismissive criticism along these lines—throughout, but especially in the second half of the book, "Vygotsky in America," in which Miller complains about "Americanized" CHAT. Mike Cole gets Chapter 7 (and he was understandably unhappy with the characterization), while James Wertsch gets two whole chapters (8 and 9). But Anna Stetsenko and Yrjo Engestrom also come in for criticism, and even Edwin Hutchins—who is not really even in the CHAT conversation—gets a dismissive footnote (p.38, footnote 29). 

In Miller's view, these commentators misrepresent Vygotsky, either deliberately (to push their own ideas) or foolishly (since the plain meaning of the text is right there in the text for all to see—Miller treats Vygotsky's writing like a conservative US Supreme Court justice treats the Constitution). "There is a not-so-thin line between interpretation and misrepresentation and it seems that this line is increasingly being ignored," he complains (p.xi). And that is a big problem, in Miller's view, since these commentators change the interpretations of other readers. One case that he discusses in the Introduction, and in more detail in Ch.10, is that of the commentaries in the English version of Vygotsky's Collected Works: 

By framing Vygotsky's texts with selected commentaries that ground his work in their own image, commentators are able to provide a form of supportive 'scaffolding' that lends a particular shape to an engagement with the text that follows. In this way, the commentaries, albeit inadvertently, constitute a subtle and indirect kind of pre-emptive censorship by providing a ready-made interpretive filter in front of the text. (p.3, my emphasis)

I'm not clear why Miller sees readers of the Collective Works as merely victims while commentators such as Cole and Stetsenko are characterized as fools or knaves. After all, Cole has been forthright about reading Vygotsky through Luria's framing and interpretation, while Stetsenko similarly came to Vygotsky through the tutelage of Leontiev. It's not as if the commentators (or anyone) came to the text without any sort of interpretive frame. Nor does it make sense that a reader of the Collective Works can't put aside the commentary and read the text itself. But we'll return to this question later, as well as some of the problems with credibility that come up in the fools-and-knaves reading.

I mentioned that Miller's book has some strong positives. That's especially true in his close reading of Vygotsky's posthumously published book, Thinking and Speech, a book that famously takes the early works of Piaget to task. In Part I, Miller, who is deeply familiar with Piaget, reads Vygotsky from a Piagetian standpoint and identifies points at which Vygotsky and Piaget actually agreed—both at the time and in Piaget's later work. As someone who has not read much Piaget, I found this section of the book interesting and illuminating.

Let's preface the discussion with some points from the Introduction. Miller emphasizes a distinction that Kozulin and others have also emphasized: that Vygotsky used signs (word meaning) as a unit of analysis for understanding consciousness (p.20), and his focus on mediation was really about sign mediation (p.21). In contrast,

Leont'ev explicitly and expressly argued that Vygotsky's semiotic emphases and focus on consciousness and word meaning were misguided and that a theory giving more weight to material forms of activity was needed. It is this distinction between meaning and consciousness, on the one hand, and material activity, on the other, that is lost in the secondary sociocultural literature, and the loss is profound because Vygotsky's entire theory is undermined if consciousness and meaning are sidelined and replaced by a general concept of activity. ... In place of the clear and unambiguous distinction that Vygotsky makes between signs as psychological tools and the material tools of labour, Cole and Wertsch collapse the distinction and substitute their own concepts of artefacts and cultural tools, respectively, concepts that are cornerstones of their own activity-driven approaches and determine how the core concept of mediation is used. (p.20)

For Vygotsky, a tool is external, while a sign is internal and involves self-mastery (p.23). Miller says that Vygotsky's contribution is not that he breaks down barriers between inside/outside or individual/social, but that "he incorporates the social as part of the constitution of his concept of a human person" via speech (p.26, his emphasis). In this reading, external signs do not substitute for internal ones, but help to manage the process; their significance is as sign, not tool (p.29).

Interestingly, Miller argues that while Americanized CHAT "has diluted Vygotsky's theory by ignoring or sidelining the role of signs and word meaning in the construction of all his key concepts," Russian activity theorists "highlight the importance of psychological tools and semiotic mediation in Vygotsky's work. Instead of twisting the meaning of his psychological concepts to suit their purpose, they look back and discover another more material Vygotsky buried deep inside his better-known semiotic persona" (p.41). He closely reads Leont'ev's preface to the third volume of the English-language Collected Works, professing to be baffled by its "confusing mixed message" because

Clearly, from his own account and assessment of Vygotsky's theory, in practice Vygotsky devoted very little effort to the study of labour activity. If by studying consciousness and meaning Vygotsky did not in principle drift away from the study of practical, objective, labour activity, then the principle to which Leont'ev refers in the above passage strikes a hollow chord that gives body to an empty claim. (p.44)

Miller seems incurious about a question that could easily be answered with a little historical investigation—or some consultation to books he has already cited. But Miller seems, here and elsewhere, to be oddly ahistorical and oddly incurious about why someone's reading would differ from his own. Throughout Part I, Vygotsky is discussed in the first person and Thinking and Speech is described as the final and therefore purest expression of a unitary theory (but see p.97 and p.178 for rare acknowledgements that Vygotsky was refining and developing this theory). In fact, Miller sometimes seems surprised that the different chapters in this book do not cohere more closely in argument, which suggests that he is unaware that the book is actually a compilation of materials from 1928-1934. That is, they span Vygotsky's instrumental period and his holistic period.

In contrast, Miller does a good job of discussing Piaget developmentally, noting which of Vygotsky's characterizations of Piaget were correct at the time and which developments of Vygotsky anticipated Piaget's later developments. His work became especially valuable to me in Ch.4, in which he critiques Vygotsky's arguably problematic notion of scientific concepts. He argues that Vygotsky has tried to shoehorn Piaget's distinction of spontaneous and non-spontaneous concepts into Vygotsky's own distinction of higher and lower mental functions (p.139). In contrast, he argues, Piaget's concepts describe parts of the human condition, not cultural knowledge, and thus do not fall under cultural-historical theory (p.139). This distinction interests me because it recalls the Uzbek expeditions that Vygotsky and Luria put together, expeditions that purported to find cultural roots in perceptual illusions. That is, I am unsure to what extent Vygotsky would acknowledge that such concepts can be separate from cultural-historical factors. Certainly he would be more receptive to such an argument in 1934 than in 1929, when he was still enthralled with the idea of the socialist alteration of man.

Moving on: In Chapter 6, Miller tackles Vygotsky's final chapter of Thinking and Speech, in which "Vygotsky engages with the innermost recesses of human consciousness and leaves little room for doubt about the ultimate focus of his life's work" (p.177). (Note that Miller interprets this chapter as a final revelation of what was there all along, rather than a development.) He adds, "It is a commonplace that meaning is always embedded in ripples of expanding contextual wholes, from word to phrase to sentence to paragraph to chapter, book, oeuvre, and so on. It is not surprising, then, that this chapter would be virtually incomprehensible without reading and understanding the previous chapters" (p.177). And "Whether or not, or the extent to which, Vygotsky changed or revised his core concepts is open to interpretation, but reading backwards from 'Thought and word' casts a different light on his project as a whole' (p.178). Specifically, Miller reads Vygotsky as arguing that "as children develop into adults they discard their external auxiliary crutches and replace them with internal mental representations" (p. 195). (Here, I think Miller could complicate this claim by rereading Hutchins and some of the other work he dismissed earlier.)

Miller adds that Vygotsky's work has been overstretched by "some commentators," who apply Vygotsky's statements about late childhood learning to learners in "full-blown adulthood" (p.196). He does not entirely clarify the distinction, but seems to gesture at the fact that children internalize intermental functions as intramental functions, turning external speech to egocentric and finally internal speech (p.196). I would have liked to see more about how adults, like children, re-externalize speech when they work at the edge of their capabilities—for instance, when an adult is trying to do complex math in her head, she might subvocalize "carry the one" or trace her finger across imaginary columns of numbers. Miller seems to get close to acknowledging this sort of externalization in adults later (pp.371-2), but doesn't quite clarify the differences, so we are left without a clear articulation of the edges of Vygotsky's pronouncements.

This chapter marks the end of Part I, the detailed examination of Thinking and Speech. As noted, I think this part is valuable for its close reading and its comparison with Piaget. At the same time, the reading is generally ahistorical and—despite Miller's attempt to acknowledge interpretive difficulties at the beginning of Chapter 6—seems wedded to the notion that meaning can be found in the plain text if people simply look for it. But, as Miller repeatedly notes, commentators and especially Western commentators take different meanings from the text than he does. In the second part of the book, he lays into these commentators.

In Chapter 7, he critiques Michael Cole, who admits to "selective borrowing" (p.205). For Cole, I think this 1996 admission is completely understandable—as noted, he first encountered Vygotsky when Luria pressed him to read Vygotsky's writings and publicize them in the West. Cole did so, even though at first he had a hard time getting his head around not only Vygotsky's writings but also Luria's own. So he ended up reading Vygotsky through Luria's work on the one hand and the work of contemporary American psychology on the other. Miller does not explain why this situation is different from the victims who read Vygotsky based on Cole's own commentary. But somehow it is different. Miller notes:

It is easy to gloss over the fact that embedded in the above passage is a gross misrepresentation that is compounded as Cole's story unfolds. Given the prominence of the term 'history' in Cole's formulation, it is not unreasonable to expect that the actual history of the Russian cultural-historical school would be respected and not bent out of recognition to accommodate a fundamentally different, if not opposite, set of ideas. At issue is the fact that the Russian cultural-historical theory was primarily developed by Vygotsky and to a considerable extent Luria, with whom he collaborated on a number of projects. ... Leont'ev moved away and severed his links with the cultural-historical approach and established his own brand, known as activity theory. (pp.206-207)

Sort of. And Leontiev, who dominated Russian psychology from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, styled himself the heir of Vygotsky. His account was not seriously contested until 1979, when Leontiev was dead and Schedrovitsky argued that activity theory deviated significantly from Vygotsky's program. That's 17 years after Cole was first exposed to Vygotsky as an exchange scholar in 1962-1963 by Luria himself, and a year after Cole coedited Mind in Society in 1978.

When Miller charges that "by employing the device of linking together Vygotsky, Luria, and Leont'ev, Cole creates the impression that they share the same views and developed a common approach to mediation" (p.207), he implies that the troika was a fiction that Cole produced on his own. This is demonstrably untrue—Luria and Leontiev both represented the troika before Cole did. Yet Miller not only lays the blame on Cole, but overreaches: "It is immensely puzzling why Cole goes to considerable lengths to claim a mythical lineage with the Russian cultural-historical theory when he, in fact, either rejects or ignores the main tenets of that theory" (p.208). Miller has just acknowledged that Luria was a codeveloper of the cultural-historical theory (pp.206-207), yet he avoids acknowledging the fact that Luria himself claimed this lineage and represented it in this way to Cole.

Miller has a colorable argument when he claims that Vygotsky's difference between psychological and physical tools is lost in Cole's work (p.212). Yet he locates it in the wrong place: here in Cole's work, rather than in the pronouncements of Vygotsky's adherents, who claimed to develop (and, arguably, did develop) Vygotsky's ideas further. This leads Miller to deny that material artifacts can do what language does, providing "a means of self-control and self-regulation of higher psychological functions" (p.213). Yet knots and cards are both material artifacts that Vygotsky describe as being used for self-regulation. Arguably, they are being used as signs, but they are also material nonetheless, a point that Miller never quite seems to address.

This brings him to a critique of Engestrom's famous triangle, which he mainly criticizes under the heading of Cole's work. Miller professes bafflement at the triangle's origins, stoutly arguing that it is not the stimulus-response triangle that Vygotsky uses (pp.214-221) and that it is more of an "article of faith" than an explanatory device (p.221). Again, Miller's lack of curiosity does not do him any favors here. Engestrom's diagram takes up the notion of mediation that is illustrated in Vygotsky's triangle but interpreted through Leontiev's book Problems of the Development of Mind. In that book, Leontiev recapitulates Engels' story of how labor made man, retaining many of Engels' major claims (such as the claim that tools are central to labor). Leontiev adds elements such as division of labor and the orientation toward an object. In his recapitulation, Engestrom hews pretty closely to the major elements, adding Rules as an additional point of mediation between individuals and communities—but he jettisons the underlying Engels story, which, although it had great currency in the USSR, was not useful in the West. Miller, unaware of this background, complains that "Engestrom indulges in the most extravagant of claims without even an attempt to justify them" (p.222). Yes, the origins are obscured, but these ideas are not made of whole cloth, they are taken from Leontiev. In lieu of doing the work to understand the idea's genealogy, Miller speculates that Engestrom likes triangles because he likes Hegel, Pierce, and Popper (p.224).

Speaking of extravagant and unjustified claims, it is worth noting that Vygotsky also enthusiastically used Engels' account in Studies on the History of Behavior. He, Luria, and Leontiev referred to it frequently in their other publications. Engels' account was hardly scientific, but it had the sort of Marxist-Leninist "truthiness" that was required in Stalinist science, and Vygotsky was not above using it.

In the interest of time, I'll skip his similarly flavored critique of Wertsch in Ch. 8-9. In Ch.10, he quarrels with the commentators of Vygotsky's Collected Works and The Essential Vygotsky. Here—to coin a phrase—Miller falls headlong into his own trap.

Here, Miller makes a point of using the Collected Works because "Vygotsky's earlier books translated into English had suffered distortions precisely because of interference and tampering with the texts by editors who decided to eliminate what they considered to be non-essential in Vygotsky's writing." In comparison, the Collected Works gave readers the ability to "understand Vygotsky by reading his complete texts in all their complexity and with their blemishes and imperfections fully exposed" (p.316). That is, the CW provided a pure text so that readers could read its plain meaning rather than distortions. Miller uses this pure text to bludgeon the commentators.

This tactic reaches its nadir in his discussion of Stetsenko's introduction to "Tool and Sign," in which he emphasizes differences between Stetsenko's claims and Vygotsky's texts. "But Vygotsky does refer to theoretically important conclusions in more than one place," he tells us, citing two similar passages to "hammer home the point" (p.342). Why did Vygotsky make nearly the same point twice? Answer: He didn't. The repetition is not Vygotsky's attempt at emphasis, it is an artifact of an irresponsible translation process, one of the reasons why the Collected Works are not considered the gold standard for Vygotsky studies.

Bizarrely, Miller seems to entertain conspiracy theories in which one commentator is silently hinting at the incompetence or malevolence of others (p.353) and in which editors remove Vygotsky's words in order to hide their own limitations (p.319).

Unfortunately, these severe drawbacks—frankly, I consider them broad mischaracterizations, based in a fervent and largely ahistorical understanding of Vygotsky's last book—undermine what is good about the book. Miller does put his finger on some important differences between cultural-historical theory and activity theory. And, although I don't know Piaget well, I think he has some valuable insights into the interplay of his ideas with Vygotsky's. But based on the more vituperative and (to my mind) demonstrably unfair conclusions Miller draws, I am hesitant to take anything else in the book on faith. I'll certainly use it to find references, but I won't rely on it to anchor my own works.

If you're looking for a polemic, or you'd like your understanding of activity theory challenged in a way that will sometimes be generative, I can recommend this book. But in my view it is deeply flawed. Its lack of charity leads it into places where a scholarly text should not go.