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The Transformative Turn in Sociocultural Theory

In the Eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach , Marx [1888/1941] famously claimed that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” [italics original]. In her recent book, The Transformative Mind , Anna Stetsenko [2017] takes up this challenge and in so doing takes sociocultural theories of development and relational metatheory in an important new direction. To see the significance of what Stetsenko is doing in this volume it is crucial to appreciate the pervasive sway the Cartesian worldview still holds over the social sciences – even when theorists attempt to resist it. Descartes’ fractured vision of a world of isolated people and objects was simply a philosophical reflection of the everyday “commonsense” experience of alienation in the increasingly “disenchanted” world of capitalism. Capitalism has changed its forms over the centuries, and various philosophers and social scientists have offered interpretations that have often been aimed at resisting the Cartesian worldview. Nevertheless, contemporary capitalist social relations still leave us laboring under a Cartesian-style commonsense experience of isolated things and people, one which finds its way insidiously into our theorizing. The only way to completely break away from the Cartesian sensibility is to ground one’s thinking in a completely alternative tradition: the relational tradition first systematized by Hegel and developed into a materialist tool for change by Marx. It is this that Stetsenko sets out to do with sociocultural theory. Stetsenko places sociocultural theory squarely in Marx’s court, going beyond most sociocultural literature which typically offers only a passing note about Vygotsky’s Marxist heritage, before moving on to a study of the effects of various social factors on development. Stetsenko gives credit to the many Vygotsky-inspired theories and research agendas falling loosely under the rubric of Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) [e.g., Cole, Engeström, & Vasquez, 1997; Rogoff, 2003; Wertsch, 1998] for using Vygotsky’s work as a basis to move developmental psychology beyond an individual-centered perspective. However, she argues that, while these approaches generate valuable information about social relations and development, as a group they lack the theoretical power to challenge the social status quo and to effectively cut