Abstract
At just over 300 pages Manolis Dafermos’s Rethinking Cultural-Historical Theory: A Dialectical Perspective on Vygotsky offers a good deal in one volume and is highly recommended. This is a collection of essays that speaks to the historical-societal origins of cultural-historical theory, many of its founding and ongoing debates, and especially L. S. Vygotsky’s initiating role in it all. And, as the subtitle suggests, it offers one thing more: an emphasis on dialectics, those which undergird the theory and those that help explain the theory’s development.
Beginning with chapter 2, we find a virtual compendium of sources revolving around the author’s own depiction of the context of late 19th and early 20th century “crisis of psychology,” which set the stage for the Vygotskian project of cultural-historical theory. Chapter 3 has the ambitious aim to explain the development of Vygotsky’s thinking itself, and to do so in a holistic manner. Chapter 4 provides rapidly paced (and another densely sourced) introduction to alternative contributions, perspectives, and debates on dialectical thought, all of which helped form the intellectual milieux of Vygotsky’s thinking more broadly. These materials inform the presentation in chapter 5 on the more specific milieux of said “crisis in psychology”—at points drawing on Soviet history as well as Vygotsky family archival materials—out of which Vygotskian cultural-historical theory would eventually emerge. This is followed by Dafermos’s portrait of the birth of a recognizable cultural-historical theory as such in chapter 6 (including the complicated impacts of Stalinism). In my opinion, chapter 7 is likely to be one of two chapters with the broadest appeal among an Adult Education Quarterly (AEQ) audience. Here we find particularly clear explanation; a personal highlight within which is a delightful discussion of the role of art, drama theory, and Stanislavsky within Vygotsky’s evolving cultural-historical theorizations. Chapter 8 adds discussion of Vygotsky’s life course in terms of processes of intellectual creativity. Chapter 9 furthers dialectical analysis of Vygotsky and the cultural-historical theory most explicitly. Like chapter 7, I suspect chapter 9 would also be especially attractive to AEQ readers. Although usefully complemented by one’s own first-hand readings of contemporary interpreters of dialectical materialism, many of whom the author cites—chapter 9 compares and contrasts different treatments, uses, and forms of dialectical ideas, and then, importantly, offers analysis (albeit brief) of cultural-historical theory and Vygotsky’s thinking in terms of three separate dialectical themes (distinctions between essence and phenomena; ascent from the abstract to the concrete; distinction between logical and historical method). Concluding the book is an epilogue emphasizing a need for integrative approaches to theorizing learning, development, and society as premised on the notions of human emancipation.
In my view, it is worth emphasizing a potent combination of features underlying the work as a whole. The book frames discussion regularly around aspects of intellectual biography (or, as the author phrases it so well: the “personal drama of ideas”) relevant to an understanding of cultural-historical theory, Vygotsky, his colleagues, and that context. I suspect this would be attractive to many readers, and all the more so since it is combined with a second feature. While the book operates from certain constellations of psychological debate, its actual contribution may be its concern for dialogue; specifically, that between research on mind, learning, and development on the one hand and philosophy on the other.
Thus, minor copyediting issues and a certain type of choppy style of writing aside, I believe this book to be both challenging and worthwhile to at least four audiences among AEQ readers. The first and likely most specialized audience is made of various types of Vygotskian scholars invested in understanding (and disputing) meta-accounts of the multiple trackways and tensions leading from Vygotsky toward the multiplicity of the contemporary cultural-historical theory scene and its future. Here the author’s parsing of the tensions between canonization of Vygotskian thought (and its potential for stagnation) and the dangers of unwarranted eclecticism (i.e., as we see in the works of Vygotsky himself, likely not all forms of eclecticism) will be engaging. The second audience is Vygotskian-inspired researchers, some of whom (like me) will benefit from being introduced to at least some sources (especially those not available in English) and/or some features of context previously unknown or underappreciated. The third and likely the largest audience may be the broader community of learning science researchers seeking what, from its standpoint, would be a fairly deep dive into Vygotsky and the foundations of subsequent cultural-historical theory traditions. And a fourth (and perhaps growing) audience may be among those who have increasingly become intrigued by the prospect of a dialectical perspective on learning; a perspective which, as Dafermos demonstrates, the world owes the Vygotskian project a significant debt of gratitude.