ABSTRACT

Introduction The debate around the contributions of Piaget and Vygotsky for contemporary developmental psychology is usually constructed around an opposition between individual and social perspectives on the process of development, with Piaget construed as the individualist as against the social theorising of Vygotsky. There are good grounds, however, for resisting such a characterisation of these theorists. As I shall argue in this paper, Piaget has a stronger grasp of social processes than this view admits, while Vygotsky’s grasp of social processes is limited in some important ways which this view does not recognise. While a review of some of the key themes in the classic contributions of these two authors will certainly entail a consideration of social aspects of development, I also want to argue that both of them ignore some central issues in considering psychological development as a social process. To make this argument it is also necessary to begin to reconnect developmental psychology with social psychology. There is something really very strange in the way these two endeavours have become so radically disconnected. Strange, because both of these traditions are fundamentally addressing similar concerns. As Moscovici has noted (1990, p. 169), they have a:

common point of departure and are animated by such close underlying issues. Their different traditions and methods allow a deep similarity to show through and tie them together. It is as if social psychology and developmental psychology were concerned with the same thing, the former in space and the latter in time, the fi rst by way of the exterior and the second by way of the interior.