Let me make a rather radical suggestion based on some ideas I have been
grappling with over the last few months. That is that cultural/social
historical theory is _not_ a theory concerned with individual differences,
at least not the way we discuss them in the United States. I have come
to the conclusion, after reading a lot of evolutionary theory in both
England and pre-revolutionary Russia, that individual differences is
a manifestation of the natural selection/struggle for survival metaphor
that has come to dominate the way we think about human development in
England and the United States. (I know there is going to be some argument
to this...let me just say as short hand that evolutionary theory is
really the only developmental theory we have, and struggle for survival
is by far the dominant metaphor. We really don't have very much choice
in our discourse and/or our thinking.) Individual differences is based
on this highly competitive notion of intraspecific competition. We are
accept it as Malthusians (with the Murray like argument that we should
gear resources based on these individual differences), or we accept it
as reformers (the great majority on this list) and the idea that we
should use individual differences to level the playing field in this
intraspecific competition.
I think cultural/social historical theory is different for two reasons.
1) Because Marx and Engels completely rejected Malthus and his notion
of intraspecific competition as a force in development, and 2) and maybe
more important, because Russian evolutionary theorists embraced Darwin,
but strongly rejected his Malthusian side, and the struggle for survival
metaphor it engendered. Russian evolutionary theorists like Bekerov,
Kessler and Kropotkin instead moved to develop a home grown version of
evolutionary theory based more on adaptation through cooperation called
mutual aid theory. So when Vygotsky and Leontiev (and even Pavlov) were
developing their notions of human development, they were doing it from
an evolutionary perspective that was in direct contrast to the perspective
of people developing theoretical frameworks in England and the United
States (notice I did not include Piaget, who also developed a paradigm
based on adaptation, but it was more Lamarckian, and less based on
cooperation, lacking the mutual aid base.
I am not saying that this means there is no such thing as individual
activity (structure) in activity theory. On the contrary I have argued
forcefully for it. I am saying that from the way I have been thinking
it cannot be applied to our more Western notion of individual differences
(it is the proverbial round peg in the square hole).
Michael Glassman
University of Houston