Sergei Rubinstein


Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and the actual founder of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. Stalin Prize recipient of 1942. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.

Life

Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was born on June 18, 1889, in Odessa to a Jewish family of a wealthy local lawyer. Rubinstein studied in Germany from 1909 to 1913 at the universities of Freiburg and Marburg and received his education in philosophy under the guidance of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, the intellectual leaders of the well known Neo-Kantianism in Marburg University. In 1914 he defended his doctorate in philosophy Eine Studie zum Problem der Methode on the methodological problems, applied specifically to Hegelian philosophy. Additionally he studied natural history, sociology, mathematics, ethics, and aesthetics. Many of his works dating back to the 1910s and 1920s remain unpublished.
In 1921 he became the professor of the department of philosophy and psychology in Novorossiysk university in Odessa. From 1922 to 1930, he was the director of the Odessa Scientific Library, then he worked at the Hertzen Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute. Rubinstein was awarded the Stalin Prize of 1941 for his monumental “Principles of Psychology”. From 1948 and up until somewhat after the death of Stalin, in the course of the anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet Union, Rubinstein was persecuted as an anti-patriot and "rootless cosmopolitan", and was forcibly removed from all positions in academia. It was only after the death of Stalin was he able to regain some of his former status. In 1956, Rubinstein was reappointed chairman of the Sector of Psychology at the Institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Psychology

Rubinstein laid the foundations of Soviet Marxist psychology with his debut psychological publication of a journal article “Problems of Psychology in Karl Marx’s Works” on the terminological and methodological issues in psychology based on the works and intellectual legacy of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This visionary and programmatic paper came out in 1934 and established a few ground principles of psychological research such as: