Key Thinkers, Past and Present (RLE Social Theory) by Jessica Kuper

Author:Jessica Kuper [Kuper, Jessica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138786141
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

Dick Geary

University of Lancaster

Further Reading

Lichtheim, G. (1970), Lukács, London.

Meszaros, I. (1972), Lukács’ Concept of Dialectics, London.

Parkinson, G. H. R. (ed.) (1970), Georg Lukács: The Man, His Work and His Ideas, London.

Luria, Alexander Romanovich (1902–1977)

Alexander Romanovich Luria, the Russian pioneer of neuropsychology, was born in Kazan in Soviet Central Asia, and died in Moscow. After graduating in social sciences from the University of Kazan in 1921, he entered the Kazan medical school. However, he had already become interested in psychology, and in 1923 he took up a position at the Institute of Psychology at Moscow State University. His earliest work used measures of word association and motor reaction to study the effects of stress and anxiety upon the expression of affective states. His account of this research sought to integrate an objective, behaviouristic approach with psychoanalytic notions about personality dynamics (Luria, 1932; 1979).

In 1924 Luria was joined by Lev Vygotsky, who was formulating his ideas on the role of language and other culturally transmitted devices in the mediation of higher mental functions. From then until Vygotsky’s death in 1934 they carried out research together with Alexei Leontiev on the nature of conscious mental processes, on the social aspects of intellectual development and on the effects of brain damage upon cognitive function. Following the Marxist-Leninist thesis that consciousness is the product of sociohistorical processes, they stressed that human cognition evolved at both the individual and the societal level within a historical context. Moreover, this development should be reflected in the cerebral organization of cognition function and in the patterns of dysfunction associated with neurological damage (Luria, 1979).

In 1931 and 1932 Luria led two expeditions to Uzbekistan and Kirghizia to examine the intellectual abilities of peasant communities under the impact of collectivization. Their findings were generally consistent with Levy-Bruhl’s notion that socio-cultural differences in cognitive behaviour reflected different stages of intellectual development. Brief reports of these expeditions appeared in Western journals. However, in the USSR it was felt undesirable that such research should be published when the central government was trying to get these communities to participate in the national economy, and fuller accounts did not appear until the 1970s (Luria, 1976b; 1979).

The same ideological perspective led to an interest in the relative importance of biological and environmental determinants of behaviour. Luria and others at the Medico-Genetic Institute in Moscow investigated this in many studies comparing twins who received different methods of instruction. But these studies, too, were felt to be politically controversial, and Luria’s own findings once again remained largely unpublished.

Vygotsky, Luria, and many of their colleagues were also attacked during the early 1930s because of their association with the mental testing movement and their promotion of Western psychological traditions in contrast to the work of Pavlov and the ‘reflexologists’. Although they set up an alternative centre for teaching and research in Kharkhov, in 1936 Luria decided to return full time to his medical training, which he had been doing on a part-time basis since the late 1920s. He graduated from the First Moscow Medical School in 1937, and then specialized in neurology.

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