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He had worked with Vygotsky and Luria since the 1920s, and in 1966 became the first Dean of the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University, where Luria also spent the last decades of his career.

Man does not know the world like a Robinson Crusoe making independent discoveries on an uninhabited island. He assimilates the experience of preceding generations of people in the course of his life; that happens precisely in the form of his mastering of meanings and to the extent that he assimilates them. Meaning is thus the form in which the individual man assimilates generalised and reflected human experience …

Psychological analysis demonstrates that inner, ideal activity has the same structure as practical activity. In thinking, too, we should consequently distinguish between activity, acts, and operations proper, and the functions of the brain realising them. It is precisely because of the commonness of the structure of inner theoretical activity and outward practical activity that their separate structural elements can and do pass into one another, so that inner activity is constantly embracing separate external acts and operations, while developed external, practical activity incorporates inner, thought actions and operations …

At a certain, relatively late stage of evolution activity may be interiorised, i.e. may also acquire the form of an inner activity of ideas, but it remains a process implementing the real life of a real subject and does not become ‘purely’ mental, opposed in principle to external, directly practical activity … This approach thus rejects the dualist opposing and isolation of inner, theoretical activity from outward, practical activity.⁸⁰

In this spirit, Luria and Vygotsky wanted to account for the social process in the acquisition of cognitive capacities in humans, including “higher” capacities such as conceptualization. They did this with two historical accounts: the first is an account of the life history of every thinking human;^§MS1.1.3b the second, the history of our species.^§MS1.1.3d Children learn to conceptualize by play, by drawing, by speaking and later by writing. Progressively, something that appears in their world as an instance becomes a concept – where things can be represented in their generality, as more than one thing of the same kind, or something that is repeatable.

But when they came to account for the development of higher capacities in the history of the species, Luria and Vygotsky’s interpretation runs into difficulties.^§MS1.1.3e

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⁸⁰ Aleksei Nikolaevich Leontyev, 1947 [2009], “An Outline of the Evolution of the Psyche,” pp. 137–244 in The Development of Mind, edited by M. Cole, Paciﬁca, CA: Marxists Internet Archive, pp. 202, 223, 243.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 107-108. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Aleksei Leontyev on the Psyche §MS1.1.3c