Epilogue
pp. 345-369
in: Robert W. Rieber, Jeffrey Wollock (eds), The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky, Berlin, Springer, 1997Abstract
L. S. Vygotsky was a brilliant theoretician of Soviet psychology. One associates his name above all with the cultural-historical theory of the development of the higher mental functions. But the richness of the ideas which Vygotsky contributed to the conceptual tissue of the organism of scientific psychology is by no means limited to this theory. For an adequate understanding of his views on the mind, we must examine them in their dynamics and development, as a constant search for new solutions. The cultural-historical theory was but one of those solutions. The strength of the conceptions developed by Vygotsky is determined by their methodological basis and their direction. As no other of the Soviet psychologists of his time, Vygotsky had mastered the methodological principles of Marxism applied to the problems of one of the concrete sciences. He emphasized that "psychology needs its own Das Kapital." His did not want to gather psychological illustrations to the well-known theses of materialistic dialectics, but to apply these theses as tools which allow us to reform the investigative process from inside and compared to which other methods of obtaining and organizing knowledge are powerless.
