Conference Program

Norbert Elias considered the plasticity of the human psyche and habitus a fundamental premise of his theory of the civilizing process. As he pointed out, history exists because of the human capacity to learn (Elias, 2010). However, Elias did not make learning a specific object of theoretical analysis, instead relying on general notions of social learning and the internalization of external constraints into internal restraints (Elias, 2001). For Elias, the concept of social learning was sufficient for his purposes, since the central problem in his investigations of the civilizing process was the formation of conscience – the superego – across different social strata and states in Europe.

A particular line of Elias’s research concerned the sociology of knowledge (Elias, 2009). Elias’s lifelong interest in this subject culminated in his last book, The Symbol Theory (Elias, 2011), in which he discussed the long-term interconnections between knowledge, communication, and thinking. In this work he came close to understanding of what cultural-historical psychology conceptualizes as higher psychological functions, although this line of inquiry remained unfinished.

A central argument of cultural-historical psychology is that higher psychological functions develop through the mastery of cultural means of mediation, such as language. Through mastering these means, individuals gain control over their own psychological processes. With the development of reflexivity, individuals become able to form psychological systems – what Vygotsky called “tertiary connections” – which enable willful, conscious, and relatively free behavior (Vygotsky, 1997). According to Vygotsky, children’s psychological development occurs within specific social situations of development, and participation in educational institutions plays a crucial role in this process (Vygotsky, 1998). As young people master cultural forms of behavior, they become active subjects of learning and of their own psychological development.

Experimental and ethnographic studies of cognitive skills conducted by Luria demonstrated that education and socialization foster the transformation of the psyche, leading to changes in the systemic and semantic organization of consciousness (Luria, 1976). Leont’ev further developed this perspective by proposing the concept of learning activity as a specific form of psychological development. In the learning process, individuals master ways of acting and operations with tools and signs that encapsulate the cultural-historical experience of humanity, thereby appropriating practical and theoretical skills developed throughout history (Davydov, 1996). Engeström later extended the concept of learning activity, arguing that in late modernity it has become a central form of activity through which learning subjects, including adults, can develop their intellectual and creative capacities by mastering existing systems of activity and generating new ones (Engeström, 2019).

This paper argues that some of the key concepts from cultural-historical psychology and activity theory, such as higher psychological functions, zone of proximal development and learning activity, help to better understand the role of education in the civilizing processes. These two approaches provide analytical tools for explaining how education contributed to functional democratization by specifying the learning mechanisms through which individuals acquire culturally mediated forms of self-regulation and autonomy, and how civilizing processes have continued in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through institutionalized learning.