Cultural-Historical Theory

Name and formation

The label 'cultural-historical' never appears in Vygotsky's own texts. Critical writings of the 1930s introduced it for the purpose of denunciation and exposure, and it later took hold among scholars who claimed to follow Vygotsky and spread through their publications. The Russian Wikipedia article on Vygotsky, however, states that the label appears once in his texts, which conflicts with accounts that it never appears; choosing between them remains a matter of source judgement. Similarly, the phrase 'higher mental functions' never appears in Vygotsky's own texts published in his lifetime as a designation for the research in question; he used 'higher psychological functions' and similar expressions.

The circle was formed in Moscow in 1924, the year Vygotsky moved there from Gomel, and it pursued its research programme from the mid-1920s into the 1930s. In 1931 psychologists of the Moscow circle moved to Kharkov to help organise the psychology section of the Ukrainian Academy of Psychoneurology (Luria as head of the section, Leontiev as head of the department of genetic psychology), Luria's Central Asian psychological expeditions took place in 1931 and 1932, and this collaboration is remembered as the 'Kharkov group'. In December 1932, after a report on consciousness in Moscow, Vygotsky formally separated from Leontiev's group in Kharkov, and Leontiev returned to Moscow in 1934. Vygotsky died in Moscow on 11 June 1934 at the age of 37 from a recurrence of tuberculosis, and by then he himself acknowledged that he was dying on the threshold of a new psychological theory of consciousness.

Repression and posthumous editing

Political constraints in Stalin-era Russia suppressed this school in the mid-1930s, and as a result the key concept of 'activity' remained confined to the field of psychology. The English Wikipedia article on Vygotsky states that after his death his writings and research were banned in the Soviet Union until Stalin's death in 1953 and that a selection of his main texts appeared only in 1956, whereas the English Wikipedia article on activity theory states that 'contrary to popular belief, Vygotsky's works were never banned under Stalin's government'. Because the two accounts conflict, the question of prohibition and suspension of publication is recorded side by side rather than asserted. Institutionally, the 1936 decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks 'On pedological distortions in the system of the People's Commissariat for Education' effectively abolished pedology as an independent discipline and social movement, and pedology, of which Vygotsky was one of the leading representatives, survived under other disciplinary names within psychology, especially child (age) psychology.

From the preparation of his works for publication after his death in 1934, systematic editing began to be applied, and critics argue that Soviet-era posthumous publications from the 1950s to the 1980s (including the six-volume collected works edited by Yaroshevsky and others in the early 1980s) amounted to systemic distortion and fabrication. Part of Russian-language scholarship holds that the 'cultural-historical' theory is the most conspicuous expression of the posthumous fabrication of Vygotsky's legacy, and that an unfinished, untitled manuscript published in distorted form in 1960 was presented as if it were his main theoretical work, in which the distinction between lower and higher mental functions and the cultural-historical theory of development were formalised. This is a polemical assessment, however, and the sources do not fix a single founding or closing year for one 'cultural-historical theory'. In Vygotsky's lifetime the theory did not exist as such, he did not complete an independent theory of development, and the 'new psychology' project of Vygotsky and Luria failed as a whole: no universal integrated theory of mind and development was established by the time of his death in 1934, nor afterwards. Collaboration continued after his death in 1934 under the guidance of Luria and Leontiev, but the outbreak of war in 1941 partly severed the links among members, contact was maintained only sporadically after the war, and the group dissolved.

Theoretical premises and concepts

Cultural-historical psychology rested on Vygotsky's and Luria's claim, following Marxist principles, that social influence (including the economic base and relations of production) and culture in general are what produced the development of 'higher psychological functions'; this idea had been discussed at least 50 years before Vygotsky under the name 'sociogenesis'. Participants broke with behaviourism and reflexology, relying on dialectical materialism, German classical philosophy, Hegel, the romantic science of Goethe, and the spirit of Marx's theses on Feuerbach, and established the concept of activity as 'artefact-mediated, object-oriented action'. Mediation is central, and signs are distinguished from tools. A tool is directed 'outward' and transforms reality, whereas a sign is directed 'inward', first transforming other people and then governing one's own behaviour; speech (the word) is a means of voluntary attention, of abstracting properties and forming concepts, and of the voluntary control of mental operations.

The concept of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) was introduced by Vygotsky in 1932-1934 to define the link between children's learning and mental development, and it is defined as the content of tasks a child cannot solve alone but can solve in joint activity or cooperation with an adult. The concept concluded the debate on the relation between learning and development and led to Vygotsky's thesis that development follows learning. The source presents the distinctions of cultural-historical theory as the division between lower and higher mental functions and locates their main difference in the level of voluntariness: natural mental processes cannot be regulated by the person, whereas higher mental functions can be consciously controlled.

Distinction: activity theory and CHAT

Activity theory, distinguished from cultural-historical theory and the concept of higher psychological functions, is a Soviet psychological school founded by Rubinstein on the principle of 'the unity of consciousness and activity' and developed by Leontiev on the basis of his own interpretation of the Vygotskian cultural-historical approach; its founding period is given as the 1920s-1930s. Rubinstein laid the foundations of the activity approach in his first psychological publications of the mid-1930s, relying on Marx's texts, and treated the concept of activity from many angles in his 1935 book Fundamentals of Psychology, while Leontiev developed activity theory itself from about the 1960s, after Rubinstein's death. Leontiev collaborated with Vygotsky and Luria on the development of Marxist psychology from 1924 to 1930, left the Vygotsky group in 1931 to take up a post in Kharkov (joined by Galperin and Zinchenko), returned to Moscow in 1934, became head of the psychology department at Moscow University in 1950 and held the post until his death in 1979, and from 1962 his formulation of activity theory became the new 'official' basis of Soviet psychology.

The term CHAT was coined by Michael Cole and popularised by Yrjö Engeström, and by the 1990s it was meant to promote the unification of the diverse strands of the Vygotskian lineage. Among those strands, cultural-historical psychology, in use from the 1930s, and activity theory, in use from the 1960s, are prominent. Activity theory was later organised into three main 'generations': the first centred on Vygotsky's mediated action from an individual perspective, the second on Leontiev's activity system with its emphasis on the collective, and the third, emerging in the mid-1990s, on multiple interacting activity systems and boundary crossing around partially shared objects. Self-declared 'Vygotskian' theories and research fields ignore the historical roots of the original project, its intended breadth and depth, and the consistent emphasis on the need for a new theory of consciousness; these include sociocultural psychology, sociohistorical psychology, activity theory, cultural psychology, and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). They must not be confused with the original Vygotsky-Luria project.

Diffusion and reception

Vygotsky's developmental psychology is an alternative to explaining child development in terms of biologically determined abilities; it is based on observation of how higher mental functions develop through social and cultural interaction and internalisation, and of how they reproduce the shared knowledge of a culture. On the relation between language and thought, Vygotsky, unlike Piaget, held that 'egocentric speech' does not disappear with maturation but turns into inner speech, which becomes 'thought'. Piaget thought egocentric speech came out of inner speech and disappeared as the child matured.

The early intellectual efforts of Vygotsky and Luria and the legacy of Soviet scholars produced a set of specific, loosely connected fields of psychological theory and practice, including cultural and child psychology and education (especially dynamic assessment and developmental education), neuropsychology, and psycholinguistics. In the anglophone world, Michael Cole was one of the first Westerners to introduce Vygotsky's and Luria's ideas to Anglo-Saxon readers, having gone to Moscow in 1962 as a psychology exchange graduate student to study for a year under Luria; the first books translated into English were Vygotsky's Thought and Language (1962), Luria's Cognitive Development (1976), Leontiev's Activity, Consciousness, and Personality (1978), and Wertsch's The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology (1981). Institutionally, Engeström's group (CRADLE) in Helsinki led CHAT-related research, the first ISCAR international congress on activity theory was held at the Berlin University of the Arts in West Berlin in 1986, ISCRAT became a legal organisation with its own statutes in Amsterdam in 1992, and in 2002 ISCRAT merged with the Society for Sociocultural Research, which holds an international congress every three years.

Examples and limits

Situations such as 'Buridan's ass', in which an auxiliary means like throwing dice transforms and resolves a problem situation, and knot-tying or counting on fingers for memory, are analysed as examples of mediated higher mental functions. Meanwhile, the self-understanding of cultural-historical theory was an unfinished 'peak/higher psychology' (a utopian project of the 'Superman'), and it is noted as a characteristic limitation of the theory that, despite declarative claims about social and goal-directed mechanisms of development, Vygotsky's original project had not been realised by the early 21st century. The sources distinguish a separate 'activity and age development' research direction that took shape over the Soviet and post-Soviet era, with the first academic handbook appearing in 2014, and therefore do not fix a single start or end year for the theory.