From Wundt to Vygotsky: The Line of Tradition
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Vygotsky knew Wilhelm Wundt’s “Völkerpsychologie” (folk psychology) intimately. His library contained several volumes, and his notes show intensive engagement with it. Wundt’s basic thesis – that the mind develops not only individually but also collectively, that language, myth, and custom are objective products that shape individual consciousness – is taken up and radicalized by Vygotsky.[1]
The transformation: Wundt remained psychologistic – he tried to explain collective mental phenomena from individual psychic processes. Vygotsky reverses the direction: the collective is primary, the individual secondary. The child is not born with a ready-made consciousness that then expresses itself collectively. The child acquires consciousness through appropriating collective tools – language, writing, numbers, cultural practices.[2]
This reversal is materialist, but not mechanistic. Vygotsky sharply criticizes behaviorism (Pavlov, Watson): the human being is not a stimulus-response automaton. He uses signs – linguistic symbols that mediate his behavior. These signs are not individual inventions, but cultural tools, created in social practice, transmitted across generations.[3]
Vygotsky’s library contained several volumes of the “Völkerpsychologie.” Documented in: Alex Kozulin: Vygotsky’s Psychology: A Biography of Ideas, Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP, 1990, pp. 116-119. ↩︎
Vygotsky formulates this explicitly in: “The Genesis of Higher Mental Functions” (1931), in: The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology, ed. James V. Wertsch, Armonk/NY: Sharpe, 1981, pp. 144-188. ↩︎
On the critique of behaviorism see: Vygotsky: “The Crisis in Psychology” (1927), in: The Collected Works, Vol. 3, New York: Plenum, 1997, pp. 233-343. ↩︎