ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the international celebration of Lev S. Vygotsky as a “genius” in the USSR, the USA, Argentina, Spain and France. That reconstruction allows for turning the focus from the Soviet psychologist to the transnational community of scholars who appropriated his ideas and put him in the discipline’s canon. Here it is argued that such celebration was a deficient account of both the context of production and reception of Vygotsky’s ideas. The aim is to highlight that the rediscovery of authors from the past is an epistemological and historiographical operation which requires a critical and reflexive stance to account for the means and conditions of circulation of knowledge, and the possibilities and limits of both the contexts of production and reception for developing Vygotsky’s ideas.
