On Liberty, Cultural Relativism and Development: A Commentary on Van der Veer's 'The Concept of Culture in Vygotsky's Thinking'

Abstract

Van der Veer's (1996) article brings the inherent tensions in Vygotsky's notion of culture to the attention of a contemporary readership. On the one hand, Vygotsky's intellectual linkages with Continental European language philosophies led him to adopt a hierarchical notion of 'cultural progress', which was also present in the social context of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. On the other hand, such a hierarchical view-of cultures differing qualitatively from each other-does not fit with the prevailing ethos on principled equality of cultures that is assumed by many contemporary Anglo-Saxon directions of social thought. In this respect, appropriation of Vygotskian ideas is complicated by the fact that, since Vygotsky's time, there has been a major shift in the predominant understanding of what it means to be 'progressive'. If 'progressive' in Vvgotsky's context led to efforts to build up a new (and 'higher' or 'more just') form of society (and 'new' kind of personality), then in the prevailing ideology of western societies in recent decades that term has been used to refrain from the creation of differentiated contrasts between societies. However, in a paradoxical way, the latter thoroughgoing relativism (which is difficult to maintain consistently in practice) is incompatible with any serious conception of development.