Boris Parygin' Social Psychology: History and Perspectives

Abstract

International literature on the history of Russian psychology is largely limited to the development of Activity theory and cultural-historical theory. This paper aims to go beyond these limits by introducing a figure little known to an international audience, Boris Parygin, who emerged in the 1960s with his “grand” project for the development of Russian social psychology, significantly different from the Soviet psychology “mainstream,” stemming from Vygotsky, Luria, and Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev. We demonstrate that Parygin's works belong to a theoretical and methodological tradition of social and humanitarian scholarship that had been developing in Russia since 1870s. This was a broad and inter-disciplinary stream of theoretical and methodological developments, including authors like Berdyaev, Mikhailovsky, and so on, that embraced various disciplines (primarily, psychology, sociology, and philosophy). Despite the fact that Parygin's project did not receive substantial support from the soviet academic community, his ideas concerning personality and emphasis on the importance of individual choice and self-determined activity mediating the impact of social surroundings, have become relevant in the context of current discussions in the international science about individual agency, including debates concerning the transformative potential of the individual upon the social structure under conditions of “morphogenetic society” (M. Archer) or “neo-structuration” (P. Sorokin).