Aleksei Leontiev

Aleksei Nikolayevich Leontiev (1903 to 1979) was a Soviet Russian developmental psychologist and philosopher and a founder of activity theory. Born and died in Moscow, he studied at Moscow State University and worked with Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria from 1924 to 1930 on a Marxist psychology that responded to behaviorism and its stimulus-response explanation of behavior. He later led a Kharkiv group that developed the psychological foundations of activity theory, returned to Moscow in 1934, and in 1966 became the first dean of the new Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University. He analysed human activity at three linked levels, activity and its motives, actions and their goals, and operations and the conditions that serve them, and wrote works such as Problems of the Development of the Mind and Activity, Consciousness, and Personality.