The Unit of Analysis and Germ Cell in Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky

Abstract

“Psychology is in need of its own Das Kapital,” wrote Vygotsky in 1928, observing that “the whole of Das Kapital is written according to this method,” the method in which Marx identifies the ‘cell’ of bourgeois society ‒ an exchange of commodities ‒ and then unfolds the entire process of bourgeois society from an analysis of the contradictions within this single cell. Vygotsky was the first to grasp Das Kapital in this way, and his application of the method of ‘analysis by units’ is his most important legacy. What Vygotsky did was to produce one study which would function as an exemplar for research in psychology. That one study addressed the age-old problem of the relation between thinking and speech. By solving this one problem in an exemplary fashion, he created a paradigm for research in all domains of psychology, and as a matter of fact, in all the sciences. Vygotsky in fact left us as many as five different exemplars of analysis by units.