IN 1728 there appeared at Venice a pocket-size book of about five hundred pages, announcing itself as volume one of a quarterly Raccolta d’ Opusculi Scientifici e Filologici. It proposed to include articles in theology, ethics, sacred and profane history, “erudition,” mathematics, physics, “and even poetry, but only if the compositions be original and distinguished, so that our readers will perhaps encounter few contributions in this field.”
Its editor was a young Camaldolite monk, Don Angelo Calogerà; its patroness was the Duchess of Parma and Piacenza, Countess Palatine, sister of the late Empress Eleanor, and mother of the Queen of Spain. Calogerà owed her patronage, and several of the articles in this first volume, to the kind offices of Count Antonio Vallisnieri, Professor of Medicine at Padua and member of the Royal Society of London.
The volume opens with a letter to Vallisnieri from a physician of Rome, describing a birth of vipers through the mouth of their mother; a long and learned reply by Vallisnieri showing that this is anatomically possible and under what conditions it may occur; and an appendix rejecting the suggestion of William Derham that this was no birth, but that the frightened mother had taken her offspring into her mouth and then released them when the danger was past. There follows a description, introduced by Vallisnieri, of a “planisferologium” invented and executed for the Duchess by one Bernardo Facino. This is “a little machine employing numerous inventions to represent, on a vertical plane thirteen inches in diameter, all that goes on from moment to moment within the primum mobile—the courses of the brightest stars of the firmament, the sun, the moon, its epicycle and dragon’s head; that is to say, the essentials of astronomy according to the most accurate ephemerides.” And in the latter part of the volume there is a history of the city of Prato, a life of the sixteenth-century historian Gualdo, a review of a recent edition of the Decameron, and a “defense of the promiscuous use of ‘your excellency’ and ‘you.’ ”
Between these two groups of articles there is “A Proposal to the Scholars of Italy” to write their autobiographies for the edification of young students and with a view to the reform of school curricula and methods. This proposal, animated by a desire “for the advancement of learning in Italy our illustrious fatherland,” is followed by much the longest article in the volume, the autobiography of Giambattista Vico, which is offered as a model. The prospective contributor is asked to relate the time and place of his birth, his parentage, and all the episodes of his life which make it remarkable or curious, so far as they can without shame be published to the world and to posterity. He is asked to weave into his narrative an exact and detailed account of all his studies. Beginning with grammar, let him say how it was taught him, whether by the methods in common use, or by some novel one; if the latter, whether it merits approval or not, and why. Proceeding thus from art to art, from science to science, let him point out the abuses and prejudices of schools and teachers, or praise their orderly curricula and sound methods, as the case may be. Let him say not only what is well and what is ill taught in the schools, but what is not taught that should be. Let him then pass on to the particular art or science to which he has devoted himself; the authors he has followed or shunned, and why; the works he has published or is preparing; how they have been criticized, what he has said or might say in defense of them, and what he would now retract. Let him candidly confess his errors, and defend only what seems defensible after due consideration, “with generous neutrality.”
Finally, it is emphasized that the proposal is addressed only to creative scholars. “Those who have published nothing but sonnets or the like slender poems, or legal books, or treatises on moral theology, or other things of that sort, will find no place among our men of letters.”
About two hundred years later the members of the American Philosophical Association, by a referendum vote, chose certain of their number to write brief intellectual autobiographies, which were published in two volumes in 1930 under the title Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements. Each contributor was asked to state his principal philosophic beliefs, the reasons supporting them, and the manner in which he had reached them. It was hoped that the publication of these philosophic autobiographies would serve the purpose of clarifying the minds of the writers and of helping their students to a better understanding of their specific doctrines. This venture was inspired by a similar one in England, and that in turn by a much more ambitious German series going back to 1920: Die Philosophie der Gegenwart in Selbstdarstellungen, whose editor took as his motto Fichte’s saying that “the kind of philosophy a man chooses depends upon the kind of man he is.” In the same decade there were similar collections for various sciences and professions, and the practice became so familiar that it is difficult now to realize the novelty of the Venetian proposal in its own time, or to do justice to the features that distinguish it from any later venture of the same general kind. The novelty is apparent from the fact that autobiography as a literary form was as yet without a name, and the model was called simply “Life of Giambattista Vico written by himself.” The distinctive features of the project were these: (a) its primarily pedagogical intent; (b) the representation of all the arts and sciences; (c) a uniform plan for all the autobiographies; and (d) a comprehensive critical supplement to the entire collection.
The proposal bore the name of Count Gian Artico di Porcía, but it was no private crotchet or sudden craze; its sponsors included such recognized scholars as Vallisnieri, Muratori, Scipione Maffei, Apostolo Zeno, and Count Pier Jacopo Martelli; and it had been under discussion at Venice for many years. Father Carlo Lodoli, censor of publications, for instance, had given much thought to the art of writing one’s own life, and had coined a Greek name for it. He called it periautography, and its practitioners periautographers. He had collected materials for a treatise expounding and illustrating the art, and had addressed an outline of it to Count Porcía. He had hoped to associate himself with the Count in promoting his enterprise, but his more pressing duties had obliged him to deny himself that pleasure.
Count Porcía himself had made some progress, he said, in the years before 1720, when the death of his chief collaborator had led him to set the project aside for a time. It seems highly probable, indeed, that the initial impetus came as early as 1714, and from the greatest philosopher then living. Louis Bourguet was at that time in Venice, and was in frequent correspondence with Leibniz. On March 22, 1714, Leibniz wrote him from Vienna as follows:
Others besides yourself have expressed to me their esteem for Abbé Conti…. Provided one day he gives us something handsome in his own right, we must not begrudge him the glory-spur of wishing to be thought original. Descartes would have had us believe that he had read scarcely anything. That was a bit too much. Yet it is good to study the discoveries of others in a way that discloses to us the source of the inventions and renders them in a sort our own. And I wish that authors would give us the history of their discoveries and the steps by which they have arrived at them. When they neglect to do so, we must try to divine these steps, in order to profit the more from their works. If the critics would do this for us in reviewing books, they would render a great service to the public.1
Though Conti had recently begun a long sojourn in France and England and did not return until 1726,2 Leibniz’s suggestion was certainly passed on to him, and perhaps by him to his friend Porcía. In any case Bourguet was in touch with the other scholars of Venice and Padua, and we may be sure that Leibniz’s letter became a matter of discussion among them, in the course of which Porcía’s project gradually took shape.
After the lapse of a few years following 1720 (during which he composed two mediocre tragedies), Porcía had revived his enterprise, and a number of autobiographies had been collected by individual solicitation, not only at Venice and Padua and other northern cities, but also at Rome and Naples. Among these was Vico’s. The time was now ripe for an appeal to the learned public at large. From those which had been and should yet be submitted, a careful selection would be made, so as to represent all the arts and sciences by autobiographies of the living Italians who had attained the greatest distinction in them. These would be published in a single volume, which would provide a measure of the proficience and advancement of learning, not by an idle onlooker but by those who had done the work, and at the same time a sure guide for the studies of young men ambitious to contribute to its further advancement. This would be guaranteed not merely by the emphasis on studies and methods in the autobiographies themselves, but also by a critical appendix in which the work of all the contributors would be submitted to an impartial and dispassionate examination, and whatever conclusions seemed warranted would be drawn.
Such was the scope of Porcía’s ambitious project. But, as he put it in his “Proposal,”
Since we are not yet in position to publish the entire work, we content ourselves with offering a model in the autobiography3 of Signor Don Giovanni Battista Vico, the celebrated Neapolitan scholar, which better than any other so far received conforms to the plan we have in mind. This autobiography will serve as a norm for anyone who, by imitating both Signor Vico’s generosity and his manner of laying before the public the detail of his studies, will lend a hand to the completion of this useful enterprise.
Unfortunately, the enterprise was never completed, and its sole surviving monument is the autobiography of Vico, which is here for the first time translated into English. In the two centuries that have intervened, the art of periautography or autobiography, like that of biography generally, has flourished beyond all expectation; and we are tempted to judge his performance by standards that are alien alike to the pedagogical undertaking that elicited it, and to Vico’s own intentions. When he wrote, there were few models by which he could have been guided, and of these he seems to have had only one consciously in mind. This was Descartes’s Discourse on Method, and he thought of it not as a model to be followed, but as an example of the faults to be avoided. The very choice of the third person is a reaction from the ubiquitous “I” of the Discourse.
Early in the original autobiography of 1725 Vico announced his intention in these words:
We shall not here feign what René Descartes craftily feigned as to the method of his studies simply in order to exalt his own philosophy and mathematics and degrade all the other studies included in divine and human learning. Rather, with the candor proper to a historian, we shall narrate plainly and step by step the entire series of Vico’s studies, in order that the proper and natural causes of his particular development as a man of letters may be known.
And looking back after six years on his actual performance, he was able to say in his continuation of 1731:
As may be seen, he wrote it as a philosopher, meditating the causes, natural and moral, and the occasions of fortune; why even from childhood he had felt an inclination for certain studies and an aversion from others; what opportunities and obstacles had advanced or retarded his progress; and lastly the effect of his own exertions in right directions, which were destined later to bear fruit in those reflections on which he built his final work, the New Science, which was to demonstrate that his intellectual life was bound to have been such as it was and not otherwise.4
Descartes’s Discourse, it will be remembered, was published as a preface to his three essays, Geometry, Meteorics, and Dioptrics, and professed to describe the method by which he had arrived at the discoveries contained therein. But Vico’s autobiography was not merely an account of the steps by which he had reached the New Science; it was also, as Croce has remarked, “the application of the New Science to the life of its author.”5
How it came to be so, and in what other ways the two were related, we shall now try to indicate.
THE decisive event in Vico’s life was his failure in the academic “concourse” or competition of 1723. He was then fifty-five years of age, and had lingered for nearly a quarter of a century in the propaedeutic chair of rhetoric, whose chief function was to prepare students for admission to the law course. It paid a miserable hundred ducats a year. In 1717 the “first morning chair of law,” which paid six hundred ducats, was vacated by Capasso’s promotion to the first “afternoon” chair, which paid eleven hundred. Up to that time all Vico’s writings had been occasional or commissioned. He had written out his lectures on rhetoric, and his inaugural orations. One of the latter, On the Method of the Studies of Our Time, had been published. He had two works of considerable historical value to his credit. He had been commissioned by the state to write the history of the conspiracy of Macchia, but the essay of another had been published in its stead. He had been commissioned by a nephew of Marshal Carafa to write his uncle’s life, and this was published in 1716. And he had composed and published epithalamia, panegyrics, funeral orations and inscriptions, and other occasional pieces. His only significant work not inspired by an occasion or commission was The Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, adumbrating an original epistemology and metaphysics in which Jacobi later saw an anticipation of Kant’s doctrine of the a priori element in perception and natural science. But Vico contrived, by extracting his epistemology from the meaning of certain Latin words, to disguise even this as a routine exercise emanating with all propriety from the chair of Latin eloquence.
When Capasso’s chair of civil law was vacated in 1717, Vico set about preparing himself for the future concourse. With the innocence of a scholar who had never learned to play the game of academic politics, he could think of nothing better than to write a legal treatise that could be laid before the commission of judges in evidence of his attainments. Unfortunately, he was constitutionally incapable of a treatise of the traditional sort. But in working on his life of Marshal Carafa he had had to consider questions of international law, and had taken the occasion to study Grotius De jure belli ac pacis, which he had since been annotating for a new edition. All his studies, linguistic, philological, literary, legal and historical, were insensibly converging upon a philosophy of human society. With an eye to the chair of civil law, but in perfect good faith, he now composed a first draft of that philosophy under the disguise of a treatise on Universal Law, taking its motto from a famous passage in Cicero De legibus: “In your opinion, then, the science of law is to be derived not from the praetor’s edict, as the majority think now, nor from the Twelve Tables, as they used to think, but from the very depths of philosophy?” With the scholar’s instinct for presenting everything as a commentary on something else, he designed this treatise as an application to law of the argument of his inaugural oration of 1719, which in turn had applied to the sciences generally the theological formula de origine, de circulo, et de constantia. The first volume (1720) corresponded to the first and second parts of the oration, the second volume (1721) to the third. These were followed by another volume (1722) of notes and excursuses. Of the three volumes thus embraced under the general title Universal Law, the second had less to do with law than the first, and the third less than the second. Like his inaugural orations, this treatise was composed in Latin, the language alike of the chair he held and of that he hoped to win.
Vico sent copies to Jean Le Clerc, editor of the Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, a learned review of European circulation. Le Clerc’s complimentary letter of acknowledgment, and his generous reviews of the first two volumes, were assiduously circulated in Naples by Vico. But they betrayed no real understanding of what he had done, and in any case the praise of a Protestant was calculated to do his cause more harm than good.
The concourse for Capasso’s chair and others vacated in the meantime was finally announced in January, 1723. Vico promptly entered his name. He delivered his concourse lecture on a fragment of the Digest on April 10, blissfully unaware that the commission of judges was already divided into two factions, both committed to other candidates. Of the twenty-nine votes, fifteen were cast for one of these and fourteen for the other. The winner, Domenico Gentile, a notorious seducer of servant girls (he later committed suicide over one of them) was so incapable of writing a book of any sort that his one attempt was withdrawn from the press after being exposed as a plagiarism.
After this blow, “giving up all hope of ever holding a worthier position in his native city,” Vico was freed at last from any temptation to write with an eye to professional advancement. One of the chapters of his Universal Law had been timidly entitled “Nova Scientia Tentatur.” The title was “invidious,” Gentile and others had said, and the treatise unintelligible. Perhaps it could not be made otherwise to them; but at any rate the new science there broached as an adjunct to jurisprudence could now be developed on its own account. Its depths could be sounded and its further reaches explored. He need no longer repeat the merely juridical and not always novel observations that had bulked so large in the first volume of the Universal Law, but could devote himself to working out what was really original in the second and third volumes. He could abandon Latin, the language of the academic world that would have none of him, and write henceforth in the language of his country and people. Was it not for this that Providence had thwarted his ambitions? Suppose he had succeeded. He would have spent the rest of his days expounding the Pandects, staggering on under the very encumbrance which had prevented the free unfolding of his thought in the Universal Law. Did not his own experience, in fact, exhibit in microcosm that action of Providence which his new science sought to trace in the macrocosm of human history?
Vico was now at the height of his creative powers. Driven in upon himself by his great disappointment, and working at high tension, by the end of 1724 he had composed in Italian the greater part of what he later called “the new science in negative form”; in the form, that is, of a destructive criticism of existing theories. These were the natural-law systems of Grotius, Selden and Pufendorf; the utilitarian doctrines of the Stoics and Epicureans, of Hobbes, Spinoza, Bayle and Locke; and the views of such scholars as Casaubon, Saumaise, Voss and Bochart. In December Cardinal Lorenzo Corsini gave Vico permission to dedicate this massive work to him, thereby promising, according to the custom of the time, to assume the whole or a substantial part of the cost of publication; and Vico pressed on in the spring of 1725 to complete the manuscript for the printer.
While he was so engaged, Abbé Lorenzo Ciccarelli (who had just published in Naples the famous first edition of Boccaccio’s commentary on Dante) conveyed Porcía’s request for his autobiography. Vico “refused several times to write it, but the repeated and courteous pleading of Ciccarelli finally won his consent.” Porcía’s enterprise was one with which so pedagogical a mind as Vico’s could not but sympathize; and as he neared the end of his thousand closely written pages of “the new science in negative form,” he was increasingly attracted by the possibility of interpreting his own life as a positive illustration and confirmation of it. Finally the manuscript was completed, and on May 8 he composed his dedicatory epistle to Cardinal Corsini. While he was waiting for the Cardinal to fulfil his implied promise so that the work could go to press, he composed Part A of his autobiography and sent it to Porcía’s Roman agent Abbé Esperti, who forwarded it to Porcía on June 23. It gives every sign of having been written with great rapidity, for the most part from memory and without consulting records or documents. But Porcía wrote to Esperti in September that Vico had grasped his idea better than anyone else, and carried it out to perfection.
In the meantime “the new science in negative form” had received its imprimatur on July 15; but on July 20 Corsini wrote from Rome withdrawing his promise because of “many exorbitant expenses” incurred on a recent visit to his diocese of Frascati. This was a blow second only to the defeat of two years before. Vico’s friend and ecclesiastical censor, Giulio Torno, suggested that he finance the publication by soliciting subscriptions; but Vico, a bookseller’s son who had lived among booksellers for the first thirty-one years of his life, had just enough practical sense to know how impossible it was to find the necessary two hundred subscribers in the Naples of that day. Yet he felt himself committed to publish. His only recourse was to do so at his own expense. He had a ring. It would cover scarcely a fourth of the cost of the two large quarto volumes to which his manuscript would ran. Within a few days it came to him with the force of inspiration that his “negative” method had been a mistake; that by the employment of a “positive” method the work could be reduced to a fourth of its compass; that it would not lose but greatly gain thereby; and that the breaking of Corsini’s promise was but one more dispensation of Providence.
Thereupon he spent August and part of September composing what he later called “the first New Science.” Printing began in September and the book came from the press in October, with the same dedicatory epistle to Corsini which Vico had written for the larger work in May; and Vico sent him a handsomely bound copy on fine paper with wide margins, accompanied by an apology that from another’s hand would have been charged with irony: “I ought to have sent it to your eminence printed in large and magnificent format, above all in the splendid types of the present age; but my slender means did not permit me to do so.” There was perhaps a trace of bitterness there, but no irony. He had published a work of genius, and Corsini was in large part responsible for its clarity of expression and perfection of form.
It must have been late in December that Vico composed Part B of the autobiography, suppressing Corsini’s default and concluding with his acknowledgment of the New Science. As a matter of fact, the Cardinal had not read it After glancing at it, he had given it to Marquis Alessandro Gregorio Capponi for an opinion as to the terms in which he should acknowledge it, and had later told him to keep it. At his death Capponi left it with the rest of his books to the Vatican Library, where it is still preserved, with this inscription on the recto of the first page: “Given to me A. G. C. by his eminence Corsini, first to examine and later in gift, December 1725.”
Vico’s original autobiography is thus to be read as the expression of his state of mind at the end of his two greatest creative efforts: Part A after completing “the new science in negative form,” and Part B after publishing “the first New Science.” Among the letters that he sent with copies of the book there is one, however, in which he speaks his mind more freely than anywhere in the autobiography. It is worth translating here in full, both for that reason and as an example of his epistolary style. It was sent on October 25, 1725, to his Capuchin friend Father Bernardo Maria Giacco, on whom the allusions to Gentile’s venery and the Cardinal’s scarlets would not be lost. It reads as follows:
With the great love I bear you and the high respect that is your due, I send your reverence the promised work on The Principles of Humanity. In your solitude its reputation will be as much enhanced as in the most famous of the universities of Europe to which it is addressed. In this city I account it as fallen on barren ground. I avoid all public places, so as not to meet the persons to whom I have sent it; and if I cannot avoid them, I greet them without stopping; for when I pause they give me not the faintest sign that they have received it, and thus they confirm my belief that it has gone forth into a desert.
All the other poor works of my mind I owe to myself, because they were devised for my own ends, with a view to winning an honorable station in my native city; but since our university has considered me unworthy of one, I assuredly owe this work entirely to it, for its unwillingness to have me occupied in expounding paragraphs [from the Pandects] has left me the leisure to compose it. Could I owe it a greater debt than this? I am sorry not to be able to avow it save in your solitude, but I there proclaim that I begrudge the labor of all the other poor works of my mind, and would like only this to survive me. For the others were devised to win me one of the higher chairs in our university, which, by judging me unworthy of it, has tacitly commanded me to labor at this work alone, to which all those of my previous life were destined to lead me.
Forever praised be Providence, which, when the weak sight of mortals sees in it nothing but stern justice, then most of all is at work on a crowning mercy! For by this work I feel myself clothed upon with a new man; I no longer wince at the things that once goaded me to bewail my hard lot and to denounce the corruption of letters that has caused that lot; for this corruption and this lot have strengthened me and enabled me to perfect this work. Moreover (if it be not true, I like to think it is) this work has filled me with a certain heroic spirit, so that I am no longer troubled by any fear of death, nor have I any mind to speak of rivals. Finally the judgment of God has set me as on a rock of adamant, for He renders justice to works of the mind by the esteem of the wise, who are always and everywhere few. Not men who crib from others’ books; not those who waste their nights in venery and wine, or sweating out schemes to hoodwink truth and virtue and hide the follies and ribaldries of the day before so as to pass for wise and good in the day ahead; nor lastly the indolent who, standing secure in the shade of their sloth, or roaming about unnoticed in the dense night of their anonymity, rob the valiant of the honor that is their due, and make bold at any chance to slash at the fair name of others, although, in the darkness of their black passion of envy, their poisonous strokes glance and sink into their own entrails. No, but men of the loftiest intellect, of a learning all their own, generous and great-hearted, whose only labor is to enrich with deathless works the commonwealth of letters.
The first of these, or among the foremost, is your reverence, whom I now devoutly pray to accept, with the magnanimity you have shown toward the others, this perhaps last but assuredly most cherished of my offspring, which by your good grace will be more at home with your coarse woollens than with the scarlets and fine silks of the great.
With humble respect, believe me, etc.
It was not until March 10, 1728, that Vico sent Porcía Part B of the autobiography, along with corrections and additions to the first draft of Part A, and a catalogue of his writings. By that time Abbé Conti had returned from France and settled again in Venice. He had sensed the greatness of the New Science and was disposed to use his considerable influence in France and England to win a wider audience for it; but the original edition in miserable format and brevier type, even if there had been enough copies left of the thousand printed, would simply not do. So he joined with Porcía and Lodoli in urging upon Vico a new edition at Venice in larger type and handsomer format, with further elucidations and a preface giving a conspectus of the system. Vico worked for a year and a half on a plan which left the original text intact, save for corrections, but loaded it with annotations and appendices. He sent the manuscript to Venice in October, 1729. The printer, probably through Lodoli, raised some objections to its excessive length, disjointed repetitiousness, and typographical difficulty. Vico had already been angered by the printing of his autobiography, not as one among many in Porcía’s completed work, but (over his repeated protests) as a model accompanying the “Proposal,” and also by the printer’s scheme for a collected edition of his works. Before that, his nerves had been racked by the unhappy controversy with “the Leipzig reviewers” of the first New Science. He was now in ill health, and there were distressing troubles at home. This was the last straw. He broke off relations with the Venetian printers and demanded the return of his manuscript. Confronted now by the same problem that had beset him when Corsini withdrew his promise, he set to work on a complete rewriting of the work on a new plan embodying his latest views in the text itself. This “second New Science” went to press at Naples in July, 1730, and was published in December, in brevier type, forty lines to the small page, as painful to read as the first, and for the same reason: the poverty of its author.
But the work had gained in substance and structure as much as it had lost in physical dress, and in this Vico saw once more the hand of Providence. Cardinal Corsini, to whom the first edition had been dedicated, and who had become for Vico a symbol of such dispensations, was elected Pope Clement XII on July 12, 1730, about the time this second edition went to press; and Vico composed for it this dedicatory inscription:
TO/CLEMENT XII/BEST OF PONTIFFS/FOR THAT/INFINITE PROVIDENCE/WITH ONE AND TIE SAME/SIMPLE AND ETERNAL COUNSEL/ ORDERING ALWAYS FOR GOOD/THE GREATEST THINGS/AND THE LEAST ALIKE/WHILE/FOR THE SPLENDOR/OF THE HOLY SEE/AND FOR THE FELICITY/OF THE CATHOLIC WORLD/LT WAS CONDUCTING YOUR GRACE/TO THE SUPREME PONTIFICATE/ORDAINED/AT THE SAME TIME/THAT THESE PRINCIPLES/OF THE NEW SCIENCE/CONCERNING/THE COMMON NATURE/OF THE NATIONS/DEDICATED/TO YOUR HOLINESS/WHEN CARDINAL BISHOP/BY VARIOUS AND DIVERS/SEEMING ADVERSITIFS/THAT IN FACT WERE OPPORTUNITIES/SHOULD BE RECONCEIVED/IN MORE APPROPRIATE FORM/AND ENRICHED/ WITH GREATER DISCOVERIES/TO THE END THAT/IMPROVED AND AUGMENTED/THEY MIGHT AGAIN TAKE THEIR PLACE/IN THE SACRED SHADOW/OF YOUR VENERABLE/PROTECTION/GIAMBATTISTA VICO/ PROSTRATE/AT YOUR MOST HOLY FEET/WHICH HE HUMBLY KISSES/CONSECRATES THEM ANEW
Meanwhile, at the instance of Muratori, Vico was elected on May 17, 1730, to the Academy of the Assorditi of Urbino, and was asked for material to be used in a volume of biographies of its members. In a letter to Muratori on June 5 he courteously declined. He had protested Porcía’s use of his autobiography, and could not in decency put out another, however brief. But if the Assorditi wished to reprint that one with his corrections, they might do so. Muratori must have renewed his request, for in a breathing spell in the spring of 1731, with the second New Science now off his hands, Vico wrote out a corrected copy of the original autobiography, and in April or May composed a continuation down to the first months of 1731. The continuation therefore had the same relation to the second New Science which the original autobiography had had to the first.
The Assorditi volume was never published, but copies of the corrected autobiography and the continuation were found among Vico’s papers after his death. The former of these was later lost, but sometime before his son Gennaro died in 1806, he turned over the continuation to the Marquis of Villarosa. It was printed for the first time, along with the original autobiography and a further continuation and extensive notes by Villarosa, in the first volume of his edition of Vico’s Opuscoli in 1818. Villarosa’s continuation, drawing heavily on the oral Vico tradition, has a gossipy character, but remains the chief single source for Vico’s later years.
This first complete edition of the autobiography followed upon a succession of editions of the New Science, beginning with one at Milan in 1801, which was the first since that which Vico prepared in 1743 and was seeing through the press when he died in January, 1744. Thus Vico’s autobiography and its two continuations are intimately connected with the publication of the successive editions of the major work in which his life found its fruition. We pass now to a review of the leading ideas of that work in relation to those of its time and place.
THE title of Vico’s major work was obviously inspired by Bacon’s Novum Organum, and still more by Galileo’s Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze, which, as Hobbes had said, “first opened to us the gate of natural philosophy universal, which is the knowledge of the nature of motion.” It was also, perhaps (though this is less clear), a challenge to Hobbes’s claim that civil philosophy was founded by his own De cive.6 At any rate, it is in Vico’s New Science, the novum organum of history, and not in Hobbes’s De cive, that the germs of all the sciences of social change are to be found.
The transition from pre-Galilean to Galilean and Newtonian physics is now a familiar tale, but the complementary transition from pre-Vichian to Vichian history has not yet been fairly told, or even adequately explored.7 The following paragraphs are therefore but tentative outline heads for some parts of a story which has yet to be written. If (as will appear in Section IV) Vico’s influence was not as immediate and palpable in the one case as Galileo’s in the other, that was not because his break with the past was less decisive, but because the prestige of Italian culture had sharply declined in the intervening century, and the lead had passed to France and England.
The chief impetus to modern critical and interpretative historiography came from the Reformation. The view gained currency that the weakness of scholasticism was ignorance of history. As Bacon put it: “This kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen: who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading … and knowing little history, either of nature or time, did out of no great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books.” On the other hand, what Bacon said of Luther was true in some degree of all the reformers: “finding what a province he had undertaken against the bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church,” he “was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time: so that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved.”8 The wars of the Reformation era facilitated the process by dissolution of monasteries and pillage of their libraries, throwing onto the market vast quantities of manuscripts and documents, which were acquired by scholars and collectors, and by the libraries of the new Protestant universities in Germany.
The Counter Reformation was eventually obliged to fight history with history, and the counter attack had not yet abated in Vico’s day. Indeed its finest fruits matured within his own lifetime in the collections of the Bollandist Fathers and the Congregation of St. Maur. Mabillon’s De re diplomatica, which founded the discipline of diplomatics and Latin paleography, was published in 1681. Four years later, when Vico was a lad of seventeen, Mabillon was in Naples in search of books and manuscripts. Montfaucon was there in 1698, and his Palaeographia Graeca appeared in 1708. But the great and indispensable work of Reformation and Counter Reformation alike was but the preparation of materials and tools for history, and not yet history in the modern sense.
A similar and eventually more powerful impetus was afforded by the rise of national states. The work it led to was often done by the same men; Mabillon and Montfaucon, for instance, made notable contributions to French history. Here again the work done during Vico’s lifetime surpassed anything before it in thoroughness and accuracy. The greatest philosopher of the age, Leibniz, established new standards in these respects. For forty years historian of the House of Brunswick, he made the history of the dynasty reflect that of nations and of the world, and became himself, in Gibbon’s phrase, “a master of the history of the middle ages.”9 In pursuit of his genealogical studies, he made a learned pilgrimage through Germany and Italy, reaching Naples in November of 1689. His inquiries roused the Duke of Modena to appoint Muratori to put the ducal archives in order and prepare a similar history of the House of Este, which Leibniz had traced to a common origin with that of Brunswick. This was only the first of many monumental enterprises performed by Muratori in the fifty years of his librarianship (1700–1750). Among them was the great Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, corresponding to Leibniz’s Scriptores Rerum Brunsvicensium. Gibbon availed himself of the work of both in his Decline and Fall, and again in his Antiquities of the House of Brunswick
Leibniz sought also to organize a German historical society to secure the cooperation of local historians, collect provincial sources, and lay the foundation for a universal history. If we examine what he says about history, however, we find much good sense in it, but no trace of the genius that appears in his other work.
Men who pride themselves on philosophy and ratiocination have a way of disparaging the study of antiquity, and the antiquarians in turn make fun of what they call the reveries of philosophers. But we should rather seek to render justice to the services of both….
The use of history consists principally in the pleasure there is in knowing origins, in the justice rendered to the men who have deserved well of other men, in the establishment of historical criticism, especially of sacred history, which supports the foundations of revelation; and (putting aside the genealogies and laws of princes and powers) in the useful teachings which the examples furnish us….
I wish there might be some persons who would devote themselves to drawing from history that which is most useful, as the extraordinary examples of virtue, remarks upon the conveniences of life, stratagems of politics and war. And I wish that a kind of universal history were written which should indicate only such things….
The chief end of history, like that of poetry, is to teach prudence and virtue by examples, and to exhibit vice in such a way as to arouse aversion and lead to its avoidance.10
The words are Leibniz’s, but the ideas are largely those of the Renaissance humanists, who had provided a third impetus. The “humane letters” which they made the staple of education included history along with grammar, poetry and rhetoric; editions of the Greek and Latin historians became a major occupation of scholars; and the Latin historians particularly—Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Curtius, Justin—were widely read in schools. The relation between history and philosophy became a common topic of educational theory. On the whole, in spite of revivals of Stoicism and Epicureanism, the moral philosophy of Aristotle retained its authority long after the eclipse of his work in other fields. But it was conceived and taught primarily as a body of precepts, and precept was less effective than example. As Thomas Blundeville phrased it in his True order and Methode of wryting and reading Histories, morality “is partly taught by the philosophers in generall precepts and rules, but the historiographers doe teach it much more plainlye by particular examples and experiences.”11 And Amyot remarked in the preface to his translation of Plutarch that historical examples “are of more force to move and instruct, then are the arguments and proofes of reason … because examples be the verie formes of our deedes, and accompanied by all circumstances … they do not onely declare what is to be done, but also worke a desire to do it…. ”12 For humanist ethics was essentially aristocratic, and tended to make honor and glory the motive to virtue, and thus to enhance still further the pedagogical value of history. The aristocrat, moved by the prospect of the survival of his own deeds in history, would find in those of Alexander, Scipio, Hannibal and Caesar as handed down by the historians, an added appeal which they could scarcely have for the common man.
This shift of interest from precept to application, from theory to practice, from philosophy to history, found its fullest and most systematic expression in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. The moral philosophers had been too exclusively concerned with defining “the exemplar or platform of good,” and not enough with “the regiment or culture of the mind … prescribing rules how to subdue, apply, and accommodate the will of man thereunto.” “Now the wisdom of application resteth principally in the exact and distinct knowledge of the precedent state or disposition, unto which we do apply.” We must therefore study “the several characters and tempers of men’s natures and dispositions”; “those impressions of nature, which are imposed upon the mind by the sex, by the age, by the region, by health and sickness … by extern fortune…. ” These matters “are touched a little by Aristotle as in passage in his Rhetorics … but they were never incorporate into moral philosophy, to which they do essentially appertain.”13
“History, poesy, and daily experience are as goodly fields where these observations grow.” “But the poets and writers of histories are the best doctors of this knowledge; where we may find painted forth with great life, how affections are kindled and incited; and how pacified and refrained … and how they do fight and encounter one with another. … Amongst the which this last is of special use in moral and civil matters; how, I say, to set affection against affection, and to master one by another.” “And therefore the form of writing which of all others is fittest … is that which Machiavel chose … namely, discourse upon histories or examples. For knowledge drawn freshly and in our view out of particulars, knoweth the way best to particulars again.” The same interest in application, which makes history the auxiliary of moral philosophy, appears in Bacon’s supreme desideratum, “a just story of learning” designed to “make learned men wise in the use and administration of learning. For it is not Saint Augustine’s nor Saint Ambrose’ works that will make so wise a divine, as ecclesiastical history, thoroughly read and observed; and the same reason is of learning.”14
Though Bacon said that “knowledges are as pyramides, whereof history is the basis,”15 he looked to historical induction not for the principles of moral philosophy, but only for techniques of application. Before him, however, Bodin had taken the more extreme position that history should teach the ends as well as the means. He was moved to write his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem,16 he says, by “the incredible usefulness of this science,” by which “we are thoroughly instructed, not only what arts are necessary for the maintenance of life, but also in general what things are to be sought and what to be shunned, what is base and what honorable, what constitution and laws are best, and what is the happy life.” But Bodin’s “method” was directed to the ease and profit of the study of history; like Bacon later, he was preoccupied with its uses, not with the prior question how it could be made scientific. Commentators on older histories and writers of new ones (Machiavelli for an instance of both) who were bent on drawing morals tended to be careless of the facts. In proportion as physics set new standards of precision and it came to be seen how difficult it was to achieve truth and certainty in history, there was less praise of its usefulness.
This change, though not without complications, may be traced in the case of Hobbes. He was taught Greek and Latin at home. At Oxford he sought relief from the scholastic curriculum in continued private study of the classics, and resumed it in the course of his twenty years as tutor and secretary to William Cavendish. Blackbourne says in his supplement to Hobbes’s Life that “he came to feel a great distaste for academic learning…. Determined therefore to try another method of philosophizing, he diligently pored over the ancient philosophers, poets and historians, both Greek and Latin, and carefully culled from their treasures whatever he could turn to his use.”17 Of the philosophers the chief was Aristotle—certainly the Rhetoric (of which he published an English digest in 1637) and probably the Ethics and Politics—the Aristotle, that is, of the humanists, not of the scholastics. Of the poets, the chief was Homer, to whom he returned in his old age. Of the historians, the chief was Thucydides, “the most politic historiographer that ever writ,”18 and the crown and end of Hobbes’s humanist period was the translation of the great historian which he undertook, it has been said,19 as a sort of philosophic reconnaissance comparable to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy.
For in history, actions of honour and dishonour do appear plainly and distinctly, which are which; but in the present age they are so disguised, that few there be, and those very careful, that be not grossly mistaken in them…. For the principal and proper work of history being to instruct and enable men, by the knowledge of actions past, to bear themselves prudently in the present and providently towards the future: there is not extant any other … that doth more naturally and fully perform it, than this of my author…. For he setteth his reader in the assemblies of the people and in the senate, at their debating; in the streets, at their seditions; and in the field, at their battles. So that look how much a man of understanding might have added to his experience, if he had then lived a beholder of their proceedings, and familiar with the men and business of the time: so much almost may he profit now, by attentive reading of the same here written…. Digressions for instruction’s cause, and other such open conveyances of precepts, (which is the philosopher’s part), he never useth; as having so clearly set before men’s eyes the ways and events of good and evil counsels, that the narration itself doth secretly instruct the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.20
Hobbes was then forty. Shortly thereafter he discovered Euclid and Galileo and developed an epistemology in which science as “knowledge of consequences” or “conditional knowledge” is contrasted with absolute knowledge or knowledge of fact, whose register is history. His own political philosophy claimed of course to be science, but there was no immediate change in his view of the credibility and value of history. A decade later he could still say in his Elements of Law (1640), perhaps with a glance at Descartes:
Now there be many things which we receive from report of others, of which it is impossible to imagine any cause of doubt: for what can be opposed against the consent of all men, in things they can know, and have no cause to report otherwise than they are (such as is a great part of our histories), unless a man would say that all the world had conspired to deceive him.
But this acknowledgment of the authenticity of history was omitted from the corresponding section of the Leviathan (1651), which emphasized rather the dubious character of all political doctrine grounded on history, the invalidity of criticism based on historic practice, the purely rhetorical value of historical allusions, and the harm that has been done by reading history, so that “there was never any thing so dearly bought, as these Western parts have bought the learning of the Greek and Latin tongues.” In his De corpore (1655) he wrote more calmly of philosophy in general that it “excludes history, as well natural as political, though most useful (nay necessary) to philosophy; because such knowledge is but experience, or authority, and not ratiocination.” But in the Latin version of the Leviathan (1668), the definitive statement of his political theory, he is ready to say curtly that “history is divided into natural and civil, neither of which pertains to our subject.”21
Hobbes thus reached late in life a view not unlike that with which Descartes began. After the usual training in “humane letters,” mathematics and philosophy at La Fléche, and in law and medicine at Poitiers, Descartes at the age of twenty “entirely abandoned the study of letters,” including history and law. He recognized that “the memorable actions of history elevate the mind, and if read with discretion help to form the judgment”; and that some reading of history, by acquainting us like travel with the manners of other nations, may disabuse us of the notion that there is anything peculiarly rational about our own.
But he who spends too much time in traveling becomes a stranger in his own country, and he who is too curious about the customs of the past is generally quite ignorant of those of the present. Besides … even the most faithful histories, if they do not alter or enhance the value of things to make them more readable, at least nearly always omit from them the baser and less notable circumstances; whence it comes that the rest does not appear as it really is, and that those who regulate their conduct by examples drawn therefrom are apt to fall into the extravagances of the knight-errants of romance, and to conceive projects which exceed their powers.
This early anti-historical bent appears most clearly in Descartes’s remarks on the necessary imperfection of whatever has been a slow growth: buildings, cities, laws, religions, sciences, even the mind of an adult!
I imagined that those peoples who were once half-savage and have become civilized only by slow degrees, forming their laws only as the damage suffered from crimes and quarrels has constrained them, could not be so well governed as those who, from the time they first came together, have observed the constitution of some wise lawgiver…. Again, I thought that since we have all passed through childhood to manhood, and had long to be governed by our desires and our preceptors (in frequent conflict with each other, and neither perhaps counseling always for the best), it is almost impossible that our judgments should be as clear and firm as they would have been had we enjoyed the full use of our reason from birth and been always guided by it alone.
Only later, when Descartes had elaborated his conception of science as rational knowledge of the mathematical type, did his critique of humanism assume definitive form.
That you may more distinctly conceive the nature of the knowledge of which I shall treat, I beg you to observe the difference which separates the sciences from the simple knowledge-by-acquaintance [connaissances] which is acquired without any discourse of reason, such as languages, history, geography, and in general whatever depends on experience alone. I readily grant that the life of a man is too short for him to acquaint himself with all that the world contains; but I am also persuaded that only a fool would wish to if he could, and that an honest man is no more obliged to know Greek or Latin than Swiss or Low-Breton, the history of the Empire than that of the least state of Europe; and that he should devote his leisure to something honest and useful, and burden his memory only with what is most necessary.22
Though this anti-historical bias was carried to further extremes by Malebranche, it may fairly be argued that it was an easy and inevitable step from criticism of history to historical criticism, and that the latter was in fact a later phase of the same movement. Spinoza and Bayle treated documents and their accepted interpretations as standing between the mind and the past it sought to recover, in precisely the same way that Descartes had treated the constructions of the imagination as standing between the mind and the reality it sought to know. Bayle’s “historical Pyrrhonism” was simply an extension of Descartes’s methodical doubt, and as the cogito ergo sum had been the residuum left by doubt, so, in history, there remained as certain fact whatever criticism was unable to demolish. The difference was that whereas the cogito had opened the way to a vast and imposing system, historical criticism, as represented by Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), contented itself with, and even gloried in, the systematic juxtaposition of unrelated facts, and perversely dwelt with greatest detail on those that were least significant.
In summary, it may be said that historical research and publication were immensely accelerated by the Reformation and Counter Reformation, and by the rise of national states; that there were many collections and compilations, but almost no histories proper, of permanent value; that the study of ancient history, or at any rate the editing and reading of the ancient historians, was fostered by the humanists; that they made much of the uses of history, but that historians who wrote in this tradition had little conscience about the facts; that the Maurists especially developed techniques for dating documents and determining their authenticity; that the rationalists cast piecemeal doubt on the credibility even of duly authenticated primary sources; that great progress was thus made in lower criticism, not much in higher, and almost none in the invention and testing of explanatory hypotheses; in short, that there was an increasing concern to find out wie es eigentlich gewesen, but scarcely any to find out wie es eigentlich geworden. Perhaps the only grand-scale work before 1725 that displays both, and certainly the only general history that takes adequate account of law and institutions, is the Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples, which Pietro Giannone published in Naples in 1723 after twenty years of intensive labor. It was promptly put on the Index and translated into English. In its pages Gibbon “observed with a critical eye the progress and abuse of Sacerdotal power, and the Revolutions of Italy in the darker ages,” and learned “the use of irony and criticism on subjects of Ecclesiastical gravity.”23
THE society that nourished Giannone was the same that nourished his slightly older contemporary Vico, and in their youth it was the freest-thinking society in Italy. Its eclectic interests and enthusiasms included atomism and Epicureanism, which have always had for free minds at Naples an appeal enhanced by local patriotism. For Naples was the Italian seat of Epicureanism in Roman times; it was there that Siro and Philodemus taught and Virgil and perhaps Lucretius studied. In the Renaissance, Giovanni Pontano, founder of its Accademia Pontaniana, was the first serious critic of the text of Lucretius. And now in Vico’s boyhood a fresh impetus to Epicurean studies had been given by the writings of Pierre Gassendi. Marchetti’s Italian translation of Lucretius, though not printed until 1717, was widely circulated in manuscript in the 1680’s and 1690’s. The new eclecticism also included the Renaissance forerunners of modern naturalism, Telesio, Bruno, and Campanella, who had all three taught at Naples. More prominent, however, were the experimentalism of Galileo, Bacon and Boyle, and the rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes. The dominant elements were Gassendist and Cartesian, and there was a gradual shift from the former to the latter. What united them all was opposition to Aristotle, Galen, and the scholastics. The exponents of the new philosophy were denounced as atheists by the clerical party, and the more reckless of them were prosecuted by the Inquisition.
The centers of these new studies were of course not in the monasteries nor in the University, but in the Academy of the Investiganti and its various successors, in two or three of the bookstores, and in an incredible number of literary salons, most of them with libraries attached. The pioneers of the awakening were Tommaso Cornelio (1614–84), Lionardo di Capua (1617–95), and the slightly younger Francesco d’Andrea (1625–98). In imitation of the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of London, they founded the Academy of the Investiganti. It had “for its devise a setting dog, with a motto out of Lucretius: Vestigia lustrat.” So we are told by Giannone, who gives us an account of its more famous members, “besides many others of great parts, who made it their whole study to shake off the heavy yoke which the philosophy of the cloisters had put upon the necks of the Neapolitans.”24 Their influence spread through the city and raised the average level of its culture to a height unequalled before or since. There were forty-odd bookstores along the short Via di San Biagio dei Librai. That of Vico’s father was one of the smallest. Among the more famous of the salons in Vico’s youth were those of Nicola Caravita (1647–1717) and Giuseppe Valletta (1636–1714). That of the latter was the most distinctively philosophical, and his library was much the best in the city. Giannone made good use of it. The bulk of it was bought by the Fathers of the Oratory in 1726, at Vico’s appraisal of fourteen thousand ducats. “Thirty years ago,” he wrote, “it was worth thirty thousand, but I had to go by the current market price, which in the case of Greek and Latin books (even the most elegant and accurate first editions) is now less than half what it was then, and the greater body of it consisted of such books.”
During the same years in which the new philosophy spread, Naples was also a chief center of the quietism of Molinos, with its emphasis on silent or “mental prayer” and “living in tranquillity of spirit.”25 Gaspar Muñoz, who translated the works of Molinos into Italian, was an influential Franciscan at Naples from 1664 to 1693. The most popular quietist preacher was Father Antonio Torres, whom Vico praises in his funeral oration for Angiola Cimmino. There were others among the Fathers of the Oratory, whose church Vico attended. The Jesuits aroused popular prejudice against quietism by charging it with asserting the uselessness of confession, oral prayer, and the cult of the saints. By pressure exerted through Louis XIV and his ambassador at Rome, they had Molinos denounced by the Inquisition as a heretic, though Pope Innocent XI (who had no love for Jesuits) thought him a saint and sought to save him. The way was thus opened for prosecution of the quietists at Naples, of whom Burnet says there were still twenty thousand some six months after the arrest of Molinos at Rome. Two of the leading Fathers of the Oratory were involved; one of them seems to have died in prison. Torres was forbidden to preach or hear confession, but the ban was removed in 1692; and about the turn of the century Giannone was a member of a congregation of lawyers to which he preached Sunday morning sermons “so learned, fervent and serious that many came to hear him.” “It was my good fortune,” Giannone says, “to have as my spiritual father this same Torres, who instructed me in the true and solid Christian morality, and warned me to put no faith in vain superstitions and outward shows, which ought to be deemed pharisaic and pagan rather than evangelical and Christian.”26
Vico says nothing of the Inquisition in his autobiography, but his writings are not fully intelligible to one who does not bear in mind that it was active in Naples throughout his lifetime.27 The city had been torn by a century of strife between the Spanish and Roman Holy Offices, both vigorously resisted by the citizens, who based their protests on a proclamation of 1510 exempting that notoriously pious city and kingdom from the Inquisition. They consistently demanded that alleged heretics be tried by the “via ordinaria,” that is by the local episcopal courts following the usual procedure for criminal trials, as distinguished from the secret procedure of the Inquisition, which denied the accused almost every means of defense, and confiscated his property. But even after temporary victories against both Holy Offices, the episcopal courts themselves often employed inquisitorial methods under pretense of adhering to the via ordinaria. Before Vico’s birth the Spanish Inquisition had withdrawn from the field, but the Papal persisted until long after his death. When he was a lad of fifteen, a priest employed in teaching philosophy was imprisoned and compelled to abjure the two propositions that “The definition of man is not that he is a reasoning animal” and that “Brutes have a kind of imperfect reason.” That was in 1683. In 1688 the Holy Office moved simultaneously against the quietists and the “Epicureans and atheists.” Of the latter, the three most deeply compromised, and one of their witnesses, were Vico’s closest friends. (Two of them he later honored as prompters of his Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, and one of these he still later chose as secular censor of his Universal Law and New Science.) Their foremost protectors, moreover, were Vico’s chief patrons, Valletta and Caravita. After the imprisonments of 1692 and the sentence of 1693, envoys were sent to Rome with a memorial of protest to the Pope by Valletta. Meantime Carlos II had prohibited all further residence in Naples of papal delegates or commissioners; but trials for heresy continued by inquisitorial methods in the archiepiscopal court; and in 1695 an Edict of Denunciation renewed the hold of the Inquisition. The Deputies of the people appealed to Charles of Austria in 1709, and in 1711 they employed Capasso to draw up a comprehensive report on inquisitional methods. Even after the accession of Carlo VII in 1734, when Naples had such protection as a resident king could afford, there were fresh outrages in 1738 and 1739, and again in 1743, the last year of Vico’s life.
Now the chief defect of detail in Vico’s autobiography is that it not only exaggerates his isolation from the new philosophy during his Vatolla years (168–95), but represents him as having taken up a position against it when he did become acquainted with it, a position which in fact he did not approach until about 1708, and did not fully reach before 1720. Actually the Rocca family divided the year between its residences at Vatolla, Portici and Naples, and there was probably no year in which its tutor did not spend some weeks or months in Naples. He was therefore in nearly continuous touch with the new eclecticism throughout his youth, and all its elements were represented in his early thought. The shift from Gassendi (that is from Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius) to Descartes took place in his own mind as well as in Neapolitan culture. His most inspired poem, “Affetti di un disperato,”28 reflects Lucretian moods and studies in the critical year 1692; it could not have been written by a devout Christian. In 1731, after publishing the second New Science, which expounded his fully developed aesthetic theory based on imagination and excluding science and all didacticism from poetry, he was prepared to say of Lucretius that “except for the poetic proems to his six books, and except for a few digressions, like the inimitably delicate description of the young heifer that has lost its mother, and the incomparably grand description of the plague at Athens, in the remainder he treats of physics in a style indistinguishable from that in which it would have been taught in a Latin course in natural philosophy.”29 But that was a libel against the most stupendous of Latin poems, penned by a poet who still loved it in spite of himself, and who had just published what is like nothing so much as a prose poem De rerum humanarum natura.
Actually, moreover, Vico became a Cartesian and remained so until his own original doctrine began to emerge; that is, until about the age of forty.30 Indeed, the greatest critic of Descartes was himself the greatest Cartesian of Italy. The very device by which he contrived in retrospect to give himself a seeming isolation from the movement—the alleged solitude of his nine Vatolla years—was itself a Cartesian touch inspired, perhaps unconsciously, by the retreat to Holland in the ninth year of which Descartes wrote the Discourse, far from all encounter with Parisian friends, “as solitary and retired as in the remotest deserts.” So near is philosophy to fiction.
The teaching of Vico’s first six inaugural orations (1699–1706) is largely Cartesian. In the third he seems even to share the contempt of Descartes and Malebranche for history. “You, philologist, boast of knowing everything about the furniture and clothing of the Romans and of being more intimate with the quarters, tribes and streets of Rome than with those of your own city. Why this pride? You know no more than did the potter, the cook, the cobbler, the summoner, the auctioneer of Rome.”31 A decade later, though still acknowledging the great service of Descartes in freeing us from the authority of Aristotle and the method of the scholastics, he regrets that “the study of languages is today considered useless, thanks to the authority of Descartes, who says that to know Latin is to know no more than Cicero’s servant girl did.”32 In the chapter “Nova scientia tentatur” of his Universal Law (1721) he recalls his former anti-historical Cartesianism: “All my life I had delighted in the use of reason more than in memory, and the more I knew in philology the more ignorant I saw myself to be. Descartes and Malebranche were not far wrong, it seemed, when they said it was alien to the philosopher to work long and hard at philology.” But if that view were pushed too far it would be the death of jurisprudence and theology, and thereby of Christian states. “So that these most eminent philosophers, if they had been zealous for the common glory of Christendom, not for the private glory of philosophers, ought to have pressed forward the study of philology far enough for philosophers to see whether it could be reduced to philosophic principles”33 and thereby made a new science.
Vico’s own approach to this new science was by way of a new theory of knowledge. The first clear trace of this appears in his inaugural oration of 1708 comparing the ancient and modern methods of study. The moderns have instituted great improvements in the physical sciences, but have unduly depreciated those studies whose matter depends on the human will and therefore involves vicissitude and probability—languages, poetry, eloquence, history, jurisprudence, politics. Moreover, the moderns have extended the geometrical method to sciences where it can only yield a misleading appearance of demonstration without its real force. “In geometry we demonstrate because we create; before we demonstrate in physics, we must be able to create there also.”34
This germ was developed into a full-blown theory of knowledge in the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians in 1710. There is now a frontal attack on Descartes. The cogito ergo sum is no refutation of scepticism, no basis for science; the sceptic is certain enough of his thinking and of his existence alike, but the certainty is that of simple consciousness (conscientia), not of science (scientia), and the cogito leaves it so. “The rule and criterion of truth is to have made it. Hence the clear and distinct idea of the mind not only cannot be the criterion of other truths, but it cannot be the criterion of that of the mind itself; for while the mind apprehends itself, it does not make itself, and because it does not make itself it is ignorant of the form or mode by which it apprehends itself.”35 Still less have we scientific or demonstrative knowledge of God’s existence and nature. “Those who try to prove God a priori are guilty of impious curiosity; for to do that amounts to making oneself the god of God, and thereby denying the God one seeks.”36 God knows all things, because He is their creator. In mathematics man counterfeits God’s creation by abstraction and definition, and thereby achieves science; but this science is not knowledge of realities like God’s knowledge of the created universe, but of mancreated fictions. Its certainty is not a matter of Cartesian self-evidence, but arises from the fact that it is a constructive science, not only in its problems but even in its theorems, though the latter have commonly been supposed to be objects of contemplation only. In proportion as human knowledge contains anything more than such abstractions or unreal entities, it is less certain: mechanics less certain than geometry and arithmetic, the rest of physics less certain than mechanics, psychology and history less certain than physics. Physics is made to approximate true science, not by the application of the geometric method after the fashion of Descartes, but by the employment of the experimental method of Bacon and Galileo, for the reason that he who performs an experiment creates the conditions under which he makes his observations. “The things which are proved in physics are those to which we can perform something similar, and the ideas as to natural things which are thought to have the most perfect clarity and on which there is the completest consensus, are those to the support of which we can bring experiments by which we so far imitate nature.”37 Vico here, as in his basic principle itself, anticipates Kant, who says that Bacon and Galileo saw that “reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own”; “holding in one hand its principles … and in the other the experiment … it must adopt as its guide … that which it has itself put into nature. It is thus that the study of nature has entered on the secure path of a science, after having for so many centuries done nothing but grope in the dark.”38
Vico thus emancipated himself from the metaphysics, theology and physics of Descartes by reducing those favored sciences to a level with the studies Descartes had despised: history, observation of nature, empirical knowledge of man and society, eloquence and poetry. But this was scarcely a vindication of his own cherished pursuits with which Vico could long remain satisfied.
While working on his life of Antonio Carafa, he read or reread Grotius On the Law of War and Peace to orient himself in questions of international law on which he was obliged to touch; and in Grotius he saw for the first time how philosophy and philology, the science of universals and the research into every sort of particular fact, need not remain two separate forms of knowledge merely juxtaposed or opposed, but might be united to constitute “a system of universal law.” Grotius led him on to other natural-law theorists, such as Selden and Pufendorf, and Pufendorf’s critique of Hobbes led him to inform himself also of the works of that greatest system-builder of a nation not given to building systems. In Hobbes he found the clue for a further and decisive extension of his own theory of knowledge. For Hobbes, who allowed that geometry had been handed down to us by the Greeks, and that Galileo had laid the foundations of natural philosophy, but asserted that civil philosophy was no older than his own De cive (1642), had later said:
Of arts, some are demonstrable, others indemonstrable; and demonstrable are those the construction of the subject whereof is in the power of the artist himself, who, in his demonstration, does no more but deduce the consequences of his own operation. The reason whereof is this, that the science of every subject is derived from a precognition of the causes, generation, and construction of the same; and consequently where the causes are known, there is place for demonstration, but not where the causes are to seek for. Geometry therefore is demonstrable, for the lines and figures from which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves; and civil philosophy is demonstrable, because we make the commonwealth ourselves. But because of natural bodies we know not the construction, but seek it from the effects, there lies no demonstration of what the causes be we seek for, but only of what they may be.39
Grotius, Pufendorf, and above all Hobbes taught Vico further that the first founders of civil society were not philosophers filled with “recondite wisdom” as he had hitherto thought, but man-beasts devoid of culture or humanity, yet guided by an obscure instinct of self-preservation that in time would draw them into social compact and thus lay the foundation-stone of civilization. It needed only the hint to revive in Vico memories of his youth, when, reading for the first time the marvelous fifth book of Lucretius, he had encountered a similar hypothesis, Epicurean but seductive: the great forest of the earth primordially rich in life-giving juices, nourishing gigantic members in men and beasts;—the first men devoid of religion, language or law; living alone in caves beside the streams; feeding on acorns, arbute-berries and other wild fruits; hunting the beasts with stones and clubs; promiscuously copulating on sight and impulse;—the first construction of huts and other rude shelters; the wearing of skins of slain beasts to ward off the cold; the gradual turning to monogamy and recognized paternity;—the theory of the spontaneous origin of speech, the comparison with the gestures of children, and the polemic against the conventionalist theory of language;—the first acquaintance with fire brought by the first stroke of lightning (or by the friction of trees in a storm), and its application to the cooking of food and the fashioning of tools and weapons;—the founding of cities and citadels; the origin of laws; the origin of religion in the awe and fear inspired by thunder and lightning, earthquakes, cataclysms, the motions of the planets, comets, meteors;—and the other details of that vast vision of the rise of man.40
There sounded again in Vico’s ears the conversations he had heard thirty years before, in which his friends who were soon thereafter haled before the Inquisition had said that “before Adam there were men in the world, who were composed of atoms, as all the animals were; and the shrewder among them began to build houses, farms, forts and cities; and formed unions among themselves, some here, some there; and the shrewdest made themselves out to be sons of Saturn, Jupiter or some other god … in order to be honored and venerated by the people; and later, when Christ our Lord came into the world, he also was ambitious to rule, and had himself declared the son of God, though he was not, and promulgated laws and got himself disciples and followers; and because the Hebrews knew he was an impostor, they had him taken and killed.”41
He also recalled certain suggestions on the origin of speech and writing, which he had read in Bacon without sensing at the time that they had potentially an importance far beyond that which their author claimed for them. Somewhat in the vein of Lucretius, Bacon had spoken of the spontaneous origin of speech, of gestures preceding words, of ideographic or hieroglyphic writing arising by spontancous analogy, before the invention of alphabets.42
Thus from Lucretius, Bacon and the natural-law theorists Vico derived suggestions which had an irresistible appeal to a mind struggling to free itself from the last remaining shackles of intellectualism. Certainly to posit as the founders of civilization not sages but brutes; to posit as the primitive and therefore basic forms of apprehension not reason but instinct, feeling, intuition, manipulatory inventiveness (that is, the apprehension not of the universal but of the particular); and to posit as the primitive and basic modes of generalization not the universals of science and philosophy but those of poetry (“poetic characters” as Vico came to call them)—was to emancipate oneself at last from Descartes and give a new dignity to those philological and historical disciplines which he had despised as resting on inferior cognitive faculties.
In the seething ferment of these new ideas in which Vico was immersed from his fiftieth to his sixty-fifth year (1717–1732), it could not fail to give him repeated pause that the initial suggestions, the points of departure, were all in pagan or Protestant authors; that in Lucretius and his master Epicurus they were accompanied by explicit denials of divine providence, and in all the rest, in spite of prudential professions of faith, by an implicit denial; and that earlier and cruder expressions of partly similar ideas had subjected the dearest friends of his youth to imprisonment and condemnation by the Inquisition. It was not worldly caution that moved him, but pious scruple; for whatever his youthful vagaries had been, he was now a devout Catholic, on terms of intimacy with monks and priests whose sympathy he cherished and whose praise he coveted in his increasing alienation from the Cartesian intellectual atmosphere about him. Yet worldly caution would not have been pointless, as shortly appeared from the response to the first expression of his new ideas in the Universal Law. Its critics were anticurialists in constant opposition to the clerics with whom Vico was now on such friendly terms, and especially to the ultracurialist Torno, whom he had chosen for his ecclesiastical censor. “Under color of a simulated piety,” as he wrote to his friend Father Giacco, they not only charged his Universal Law with irreligion, but also revived against him the memory of his youthful “weaknesses and errors, which, as I have gravely noted them in others, remain deeply etched in my memory.”43
It is not possible to trace with any assurance the precise steps by which Vico moved toward a resolution of the conflict between his Catholic piety and his eminently secular if not heretical philosophy. But he attributes the immediate inspiration of his Universal Law to a passage of St. Augustine,44 and it seems likely that in rereading the City of God while meditating his new philosophy of history, he came gradually to see how a reinterpretation of the action of providence in history would not only put his scruples at rest, but also supply a radical philosophic deficiency in all the authors from Epicurus to Hobbes whose lead he was following, and substitute a “rational civil theology of divine providence” for the specious natural theology which was riding in the wake of physical science. For this purpose, the essential distinction was that between the general providence which extended to all the gentile peoples, and the special grace which in antiquity was confined to the Hebrews. The latter was direct and transcendent, the former indirect and immanent, operating through nature and second causes, leaving individual freedom of choice intact, yet effecting a regular evolution in the aggregate toward society and civilization. The immanent logic of this process of development was uniform for all peoples in its general outline, and “providence” was the obvious formula for it.
The crux of the matter was the problem of origins, the historian’s problem par excellence, which Bacon, in his inventory of histories, had cavalierly dismissed as insoluble.
As to the heathen antiquities of the world, it is in vain to note them for deficient. Deficient they are no doubt, consisting most of fables and fragments; but the deficience cannot be holpen; for antiquity is like fame, caput inter nubila condit, her head is muffled from our sight. For the history of the exemplar states [of Greece and Rome] it is extant in good perfection.45
Vico was both more sceptical and more hopeful. Under his scrutiny the extant history of the exemplar states themselves dissolved into fables and fragments as far as the Peloponnesian and the Second Punic War. But he undertook to reconstruct their history and that of heathen antiquity as well, by applying to these very fables and fragments a new exegesis, based on comparative mythology and a new genetic psychology (“a metaphysic of the human mind” he called it) in place of the meager and rationalistic psychology of the natural-law theorists.
Hobbes had said that civil philosophy was demonstrable because we make the commonwealth ourselves. Certainly Leviathan was not begotten by any such contract as he defined; yet the clue was there, needing only to be rightly understood. The commonwealth was made by man, but not by such men as we now are, at the conscious, rational, intellectualist level on which we elaborate definitions of the social contract. Yet the first makers of it may be discovered by probing the depths of our own minds, and applying that depth psychology to Bacon’s fables and fragments. At the end of his long search, when the New Science has fully matured, Vico is able to sing this song of triumph:
In the night of thick darkness which envelops the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of human society has certainly been made by men, and its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone truly knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, which, since men have made it, man can truly know. This aberration was a consequence of that infirmity of the human mind, by which, immersed and buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things, and finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious.46
MODERN historiography, so far as it differs from ancient and medieval in principle and not merely in technical proficiency, range and quantity of output, rests on the discovery of man as a peculiarly historical being, subject to a development transcending the life of any individual, nation or race. It is by virtue of this discovery that modern history has been the complement and polar opposite of modern physics in the making of the modern mind.
Wherever the impact of this discovery is felt, the interest in history shifts from personal feats and exploits, wars, treaties, alliances, and dynastic successions, to customs, laws, institutions, forms of economic and social organization, languages, arts, religions, sciences, climates of opinion. History ceases to be Cicero’s “storehouse of the countless lessons of the past,” Augustine’s mixed career of the two cities, the medieval roll call of saints and sinners, heroes and villains, Machiavelli’s repertory of models for a wise prince’s imitation, Bossuet’s epiphany of a kind of celestial Louis XIV, Bayle’s register of atomic doubt-resistant fact, or Bolingbroke’s “philosophy teaching by examples.” It is not embarrassed by the failure of peoples and governments to learn anything from it, since it has nothing to teach but history. It has acquired an end of its own, which emancipates it from theology, morals and politics. In pursuit of that end, it calls into being a corps of auxiliary disciplines: anthropology, genetic and social psychology, sociology, comparative mythology, comparative law, philosophy of history.
So far as this discovery and the adumbration of these auxiliary disciplines can be ascribed to a single man or book, the man is Vico and the book is the New Science. The discovery and the adumbration were in the first place outgrowths of the attempt to solve a problem inherited from the natural-law theorists, but in the successive versions of Vico’s major work from the Universal Law to the third New Science (1720–1744) the problem was increasingly overshadowed by the new historiography brought to bear upon it.
The problem as Vico found it was the construction of civil society out of individual units. In that form the problem was insoluble; but specious solutions had been proposed in terms of an abstract natural law deduced from the assumed nature of these individual units: a law quod semper, ubique, et ab omnibus. This law supposed to transcend history was in reality only “the natural law of the philosophers” of the seventeenth century, a rationalization of the demands of the rising middle class, representing therefore a stage of culture remote from the beginnings of civil society. To ascribe universality to this law was in effect to extend indefinitely backwards the psychology of a developed civilization. To this and every similar “vanity of the scholars” and “vanity of the nations,” Vico opposed his fundamental axiom that “every theory must start from the point where the matter of which it treats first began to take shape.”48 The problem of the construction of civil society must accordingly be reformulated as the problem of its historical origins.
The “natural law of the philosophers” was conceived in terms of the distinction drawn by the later Roman jurists between civil law, natural law, and “law of nations” (ius civile, naturale, gentium). This distinction was a late product of philosophic reflection and analysis; even then, there were not three distinct bodies of law corresponding thereto; still less was this the case in the beginnings of law and society. For the concrete reality in which all three were merged without distinction, Vico therefore employed the portmanteau phrase “natural law of the peoples” (ius naturale gentium, diritto naturale delle genti), which he contrasted with the “natural law of the philosophers,” the abstractions, that is, of Grotius, Pufendorf and Hobbes. This one law was natural, as growing naturally with the growth of society; it was civil, as being for each society its law, the changing measure of its changing civilization; and it was ius gentium in the double sense of (a) law of the peoples, as being the work not of the “recondite wisdom” of mythical founding sages, but of the “vulgar wisdom” of the peoples themselves, and (b) universal law, as having beneath superficial differences of form a substance which at a given stage of a society’s development was identical with that of any other at the corresponding stage of its development. In this pregnant sense of the phrase, the problem inherited by Vico was reformulated as that of “the natural law of the peoples.”
To the first New Science Vico prefixed a synopsis beginning as follows:
in which is meditated a Science concerning the nature [ = genesis] of the nations, from which [nature] has issued their humanity [ = civilization], which in every case began with religion and was completed by sciences, disciplines, and arts.
“We wander ignorant of the men and the places”: VIRGIL.—Necessity of the end and difficulty of the means of finding this Science within the ferine wandering of Hobbes’s licentious and violent men, of Grotius’s solitary, weak and needy simpletons, of Pufendorf’s vagrants cast into this world without divine care or help, from which the gentile nations have arisen.49
His starting point was therefore roughly the state of nature of the natural-law theories. In order to reach it from Genesis, as his scruples required, he imagined the descendants of Ham and Japheth, and those of Shem except the Hebraic line, as dispersed after the flood, wandering in “the vast forest of the earth,” forgetting the speech and customs of their ancestors, and descending to the level of beasts.
During the two centuries Vico allowed for this process of bestialization, the earth slowly dried, until the first thunderclaps caused by its exhalations startled these brutish men here and there in the act of shameless canine copulation with captured women, and terrified them into the shelter and secrecy of caves for their intercourse. Out of these retreats of fear and shame the first families arose, with a settled life apart in the caves of the earth, sanctioned by “the frightful religions” started in their minds by the thunderbolts of the sky god. With settled habitations came clearing and tilling of the soil, ownership, property, morality, and burial of the dead. Marriage, childbirth, burial, the sowing and reaping of crops, were surrounded with religious ceremonial. The family-father was its king, priest and prophet, sacrificing to the gods to win their favor, and taking auspices to declare their will. He was the arbiter of right and wrong, rewarding the good and punishing the wrongdoer. This “state of the families,” “monastic, Cyclopean, monarchic,” and not the antecedent chaos, with its “bestial communism of women” and “confusion of human seeds,” was the true state of nature from which the civil state emerged; and the three pre-political institutions of religion, marriage, and burial of the dead were the first principles of the new science. This primitive stage of social evolution Vico called “the age of the gods.”
The state of nature was one not of static equality, but of differentiation, inequality, and dialectical change. There was inequality between the organized family and the “lawless vagrants” still living in that chaos out of which the family grew; inequality within the family, inequality between family and family, inequality among the vagrants themselves. The more violent and enterprising of the latter raided the homesteads of the settlers and burned or carried off their crops; but they preyed also on the weaker and more helpless of their own kind, who were thereby driven to throw themselves on the mercy of the settlers. “Grotius’s simpletons and Pufendorf’s waifs, to save themselves from Hobbes’s men of violence, fled to the altars of the strong.” These refugees were received as dependents, “clients,” serfs, tillers of the soil, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” The family unit was thus enlarged and still further differentiated, and the tension between its elements was heightened. To the distinctions of sex and generation there was added a distinction of blood and class.
The serfs of a family had less in common with its blood members than with the serfs of another; the father of a family had more in common with the father of another than with his own serfs. To secure themselves against mutinies of their serfs as well as against outlaw invasions, the fathers formed mutual alliances, patrician orders, “heroic states,” with the fathers as citizens and the serfs as plebs. The heroic state was not a monarchy like the earlier family state, for its king was simply one of the fathers, the magistrate of the order; often, in fact, there were two or more such magistrates. It was not a democracy, for the “people” was simply the patrician order, exclusive of the plebs; the only freedom, the only rights, were those of the patricians; the fatherland was the land of the fathers. It was in fact a feudal aristocracy. This second stage of social evolution Vico called “the age of the heroes.”
The whole life of these heroic states centered in the conflict between patricians and plebeians. The two classes, as Vico put it, had two eternal contrary properties, the plebeians wishing always to change the state, and the nobles to preserve it as it was. The patricians were better organized; they owned the land; they had the arms and the military discipline; they had a monopoly of public office and knowledge of law; they alone knew how to ascertain the will and win the faver of the gods; the solemn rites of marriage and burial were theirs alone; and they were bound by oath to keep the plebs in subjection. But it was inevitable that the plebs should press successively for land tenure, legal marriage, legitimate children, testamentary succession, citizenship, eligibility to office, and the sharing of the auspices, the key to all the rest. And it was inevitable that the ruling class should be compelled to admit the plebs to one after another of the rights which it had at first so jealously guarded. The heroic states were transformed into democratic or “free popular republics,” and the third stage of social evolution, the historical age, “the age of men,” began.
It was their economic and social position in relation to each other, and not a difference of mentality, which determined that in the long unfolding of legal change the plebeians should represent reason and the patricians authority. The approximation of law to equity, the gradual establishment of equal rights, was brought about by the struggle of the plebeians to acquire full humanitas. The vindication of the rational nature of man as man was an historical process, the same process by which the rationality was achieved; and the main spring of the process was the dialectical opposition of the classes.
But the age of men ran its course too. The discipline, respect for law, and social solidarity of the patrician orders gave way to a humane and easy tolerance. Philosophy took the place of religion. Equality led to license. There was dispersion of private interests and decline of public spirit. Birth was first displaced by wealth as the sign of fitness to rule, since to acquire or retain it implied industry, thrift, and foresight. But in time even the property qualification was swept away, and political power was extended to those who lacked the leisure or the will to exercise it wisely. The meanest citizen could press the public force into the service of his appetites and whims, or sell his vote to the highest bidder among faction leaders and demagogues. The external symptoms of the process of disintegration were abated by the rise of bureaucratic monarchies, for the most part even more “humane” than the democracies, yet relieving nobles and plebeians alike of public responsibility. In this last phase of “the age of men,” the humanization and softening of customs and laws continued, until breakdown within or conquest from without brought on a reversion to barbarism, and a new cycle of the three ages began. In Europe Christianity now took the place of the “frightful religions” of the first “age of the gods”; the later middle age revived the feudal institutions of the “age of the heroes”; and “the natural law of the philosophers” of the seventeenth century was a product of the second “age of men.”
We are now in position to discern what was involved in Vico’s reformulation of the problem of the construction of civil society as that of its historical development, and in his solution of it by working his way back from “the natural law of the philosophers” to “the natural law of the peoples.” The problem could not be solved by the analytic device of starting with the human beings of the second “age of men,” stripping them of the utilitarian advantages they owed to the politically organized societies in which they lived, yet leaving them in full possession of the rational faculties required to appreciate those advantages and to contract at the lowest terms for their recovery. For these men and these faculties were the men and the faculties of these societies at this stage of their development, two cycles removed from the origins of civil society. They had become what they were by the same historical process by which the societies themselves had evolved. In fashioning this world of nations, man had fashioned himself. The fully developed rationality, the planning intelligence of his mature humanity, was the outcome of that process; and it was a fatal error to read it back into the initial steps, which were taken by brutish men who did not so much as know the meaning of a promise.
The only approach to a social contract in the age-long process was the alliance of the fathers which marked the transition from the family state to the heroic state. But this was no single act of prudent foresight, the work of a constitutional assembly drawing up articles of federation. It was itself a long process in which larger and more permanent unions grew insensibly out of smaller and more temporary ones, each improvised under the stress of a particular occasion and having no aim beyond it. Far from intending the national states and cultures which later eventuated, the fathers did not consciously plan even the heroic states which were the immediate outcome of their spontaneously acquired habits of cooperation. Instead, rebus ipsis dictantibus, the heroic states were called into being and gradually strengthened by repeated mutinies of serfs and raids of outlaws, who least of all had any such design.
Here as throughout the development of man and society there was thus an inherent logic transcending the conscious intentions of individual agents. For this immanent logic, which Hegel was later to call “the cunning of reason” deploying the passions of men, which Wundt was to call “the heterogony of ends” and Bosanquet “a teleology above the level of finite consciousness,” Vico sought no other formula than that of providence acting not by force of laws imposed from without but “making use of the customs of men, which are as free of all force as the spontaneous expressions of their own nature.”
Men have themselves made this world of nations … but this world has evidently issued from a mind often diverse, at times quite contrary, and always superior to the particular ends that men have proposed to themselves; which narrow ends, made means to serve wider ends, it has always employed to preserve the human race upon the earth. Men who meant to gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, founded instead the chastity of marriage from which the families arose. The fathers meant to exercise without restraint their paternal power over their serfs, and they subjected them to the civil power from which the cities arose. The ruling class of nobles meant to abuse their lordly freedom over the plebeians, and they had to submit to the laws which established popular freedom. The free peoples meant to shake off the yoke of their laws, and they became subject to monarchs. The monarchs meant to strengthen their own positions by debasing their subjects with all the vices of dissoluteness, and they disposed them to endure slavery at the hands of stronger nations. The nations meant to dissolve themselves, and their remnants fled for safety to the wilderness, whence, like the phoenix, they rose again. That which did all this was mind, because men did it with intelligence; it was not fate, because they did it by choice; not chance, because the results of their always so acting are perpetually the same.50
Under the spell of the tremendous advance of physical science in the seventeenth century, the thinkers of Vico’s time had come to regard it as having a certainty far superior to that of history, and to regard the laws of physical nature as constituting a revelation of God superior to any revelation of Himself in history; indeed, as being the only revelation above suspicion. Not content to raise history again to an equal status in these respects, Vico’s theory of knowledge claimed for it a higher evidence, and his new science became in one of its aspects “a rational civil theology of divine providence” claiming precedence over the “natural theology” which contemplated that attribute of God in the physical order.51 For though Vico dwelt by preference on Bacon’s “exemplar states” of Greece and Rome, what he sought and found in them was “an ideal eternal history, traversed in time by the history of every nation in its origin, growth, acme, decline and fall.”52 The ideal eternal state was thus not the abstract state of Plato, nor some particular state at some past or future stage of its development, but “the great city of the nations founded and governed by God,”53 or, more simply, history itself.
Vico’s reconstruction of the development of society and civilization, by which his problem was solved, was made possible by a discovery which he calls “the master key” of his new science; namely that “the first gentile peoples were poets … who spoke in poetic characters.”54 This discovery had cost him, he says, the laborious researches of twenty years, groping his way back “from these humane and refined natures of ours to those wild and savage natures which we cannot really imagine and can only apprehend with great toil.”55 It is at this point that we can observe most clearly that transition from rationalism to historicism in Vico’s own mind, which took place in the thought of Europe generally in the century after his death. For he himself had begun with most of the prejudices which it was the burden of his new science to undermine. As Bacon had assumed in his Wisdom of the Ancients that the fables and myths preserved in Homer and Hesiod were relics from wiser and better times, so Vico, in his Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, had assumed that the Latin language had early been made by disciples of Etruscan and Greek teachers a repository of profound philosophy, and especially of that of Zeno of Elea. On this assumption, he had proceeded to read his own metaphysics and epistemology into certain Latin roots and phrases. One is tempted to say that if he had begun with no such assumption, he would have found the way less toilsome to his mature view that the wisdom of the ancients was popular, not recondite or profound; poetic, not philosophical; practical, not theoretical. But it is more likely that he would not have found the way at all; that if he had not looked for abstruse and speculative ideas in the roots of speech, he would never have discovered the true character of the fantastic thought in which language began.
The primary importance of this discovery for Vico arose from the fact that when he had turned the problem of the construction of society into that of its historical origin and development, he was at once confronted by traditions assigning the founding of states and their constitutional changes to sages, lawgivers and poets. To take these traditions at face value was to land in a rationalism nearly as preposterous as that of the social contract from which he was struggling to escape. On the other hand, to interpret them as noble lies of Plato’s kind, pedagogical impostures invented for reasons of state, was not only a worse rationalism, but deprived of evidential value the only materials available for early history. Just as the “frightful religions” of primitive men were not contrived by clever impostors but sprang directly from the fear and credulity of the people themselves, so the mythical stories of the origins of society were not artful allegorical renderings of antecedent ratiocination, but spontaneous expressions of the folk mind of the ages preceding the rise of reflective thinking. As yet incapable of logical abstraction and generalization, primitive man thought in terms of “fantastic universals” or “poetic characters,” particular men (real or imagined) and particular acts or gestures magnified into types of social classes and institutions. Romulus, for example, was such a poetic character or type of the fathers founding Rome on feudal clientships, and dividing it into patrician and plebeian orders. To him were ascribed on the one hand all “the properties of the founders of the first cities of Latium,” and on the other all the laws, developed over centuries, “concerning the orders.” Numa was a type of the religiosity of the fathers in their priestly rôles; to him were assigned all the laws “concerning sacred things and divine ceremonies,” even those which arose “in the most pompous period of Roman religion.” Tarquinius Priscus was a similar type of the fathers surrounding their political power with the trappings of majesty; Tullus Hostilius of the organization of their military system; and Servius Tullius of their concession to the plebs of bonitary ownership of land. These and the other so-called kings of Rome were of a piece with Minos and Cadmus, Draco and Lycurgus among the Greeks. But historians in the age of men, who had lost the key to primitive psychology and supposed that men had always thought like themselves, took these popular traditions for literal history and invented chronological systems which they could be trimmed to fit. Until their work was dissolved again into the elements from which they had composed it, and until these mythical elements were interpreted by the new science, there could be no credible history of Greece and Rome before the Peloponnesian and the Second Punic War.
Vico not only tracks the evolution of civil society into the subtlest nuances of its subordinate phases, but sketches in the parallel development of the other elements of culture, as if to reinforce his main thesis that the state exists by nature and history and not by convention, by showing that this is true of human culture as a whole. Corresponding to the three stages of the political cycle are three kinds of “natures” (ways of apprehending the nature of the world and of man)—animistic, mythopæic, scientific; three kinds of customs—religious, punctilious, humane; three kinds of natural law; three kinds of language expressed in three kinds of characters; three kinds of jurisprudence employing three kinds of authority and as many of “reasons”—divination, reason of state, natural equity—in as many of judgments. Vico has a sharp eye for organic relations among the aspects of a single culture, as in his fine pages deriving the Socratic and post-Socratic logic, metaphysics and moral philosophy from the disputations of the Athenian assembly and courts.56 But it is “one of the constant labors” of the new science to show that “the natural law of the peoples” had an independent origin and development among each people, and only later, “as a result of wars, embassies, alliances and commerce, came to be recognized as common to the entire human race.”57 And not the least of Vico’s achievements was his brilliant critique of “the fiction that the law of the Twelve Tables came to Rome from Greece.” His other chef-d’œuvre of criticism was his “discovery of the true Homer” as the Greek people of the heroic or poetic age, mythological in thought, barbaric in manners, and ignorant of the “recondite wisdom” of the philosophers. The two critiques had a precisely parallel development in Vico’s thinking, and played parallel roles in his reconstructions of Greek and Roman history. And just as the permanent value of his Homeric theory lay not in the denial of a personal Homer but in the recovery of the modes of thought and feeling of the age reflected in the Homeric poems, so that of his demonstration of the essentially archaic and genuinely Roman character of the Twelve Tables lay in his showing how “the ancient Roman law was a serious poem, and the ancient jurisprudence a severe kind of poetry, within which are found the first rough outlines of legal metaphysic.”58
One of the principal aspects of the new science is “a history of human ideas,” the first important step toward the realization of Bacon’s great desideratum of “a just story” of “the general state of learning … from age to age.” Here as else where Vico concentrates by preference on the origins and early stages. The second book of the second New Science, much the longest of the five, is called “Of Poetic Wisdom” (the vulgar wisdom of the age of heroes) and has for its main divisions poetic metaphysics, logic, morals, economics, politics, physics, cosmography, astronomy, chronology and geography. Whereas Bacon’s Novum Organum had shown “how the sciences as they now stand may be further perfected,” Vico’s novum organum of history disclosed “the ancient world of the sciences, how crude they were in their origins, and how they were gradually refined until they reached the form in which we have received them.”59 Here is one more expression of Vico’s reaction against the rationalism which exalted natural science and disparaged history. He puts the sciences in their place by swallowing them up in history, and anticipates the later view that the true philosophy of science is simply its history.
IN the present state of Vico studies, a satisfactory account of his influence is not possible, for the reason that research into the diffusion of his ideas beyond Italy in the eighteenth century has scarcely begun, and that in the nineteenth century, where we are on surer ground, they had already so permeated the thought of Europe that, with few exceptions, those who took the trouble to read him for themselves did not so much learn from him as recognize in him what was already their own, and acknowledge him as the great forerunner of doctrines and causes to which they were already committed. It is not likely that we shall soon be in a better position in this respect, for the diffusion was piecemeal: there was no eighteenth-century thinker who grasped the whole range of Vico’s thought; and outside Italy his influence was largely indirect and anonymous. The acknowledgment of intellectual debts was still a rare grace, not yet a canon of literary etiquette. The acknowledgments in respect of Vico lie buried in unpublished letters and in books indexed imperfectly or not at all, and are turned up by chance here and there in the course of other investigations. Many links are still to be discovered, particularly in Great Britain. In the meantime, we can do little more than sketch the history of his reputation, and indicate directions in which further research may establish genuine influence.60
THE story of the varying fortunes of Vico’s ideas in Italy has often been told, and it will suffice here to mention a few episodes which had repercussions elsewhere. There was a fairly continuous Vico tradition in aesthetics and literary criticism;61 Conti absorbed some elements, and Pagano more; they are prominent in the dissertations and notes accompanying Cesarotti’s translations of Homer and Ossian; they animate the discourses and essays of Foscolo; and eventually inspire the work of such masters of criticism as De Sanctis and Croce. There was also a continuous Vico tradition in jurisprudence, economics, and political theory; his name and ideas are never far to seek in the immensely productive Neapolitan school of law. This tradition goes back to his ablest pupil, Genovesi, who occupied at Naples the first European chair of political economy, and to whom we owe the memory of Vico’s pungent comment on people who keep up appearances in public by starving themselves at home: “There are too many whose carriages are drawn by their own guts.”62 More widely known abroad was Ferdinando Galiani, whose education had been directed by his uncle, Vico’s friend Celestino Galiani, and who was himself the first publicist in whom Vico’s influence bore fruit. Friend and indefatigable correspondent of the leaders of the French enlightenment, he was its shrewd though good-humored critic, and the standpoint of his criticism was Vichian though the shafts of wit and the practical applications in his essays on trade in grain, on money, on the duties of neutral princes, were his own. In the last quarter of the century Filangieri in his Science of Legislation (1780–85) attempted a conciliation of Vico’s ideas with those of Montesquieu and the Encyclopedists. His work was admired and its circulation promoted by Franklin, and an English translation appeared in 1806. Pagano, mentioned above as a critic, was more famous in Italy and abroad for his works on criminal procedure. “If you would attain Vico’s flights,” said Cuoco, “you must begin by walking in Pagano’s footsteps.”63
Two controversies of some proportions kept Vico’s name before the educated public in the eighteenth century. The first revolved around his critique of the Law of the Twelve Tables, which was attacked and defended in Italy and France within his lifetime. The second was the famous contest of the Ferini and the Antiferini, which also began in his lifetime, but culminated between 1760 and 1780. His theory of the ferine origin of gentile humanity was defended by the former party, and attacked by the latter as incompatible with Scripture and with Catholic philosophy. The chief protagonists of the two sects were the Neapolitan Emanuele Duni,64 professor of jurisprudence at the University of Rome, and the Dominican G. F. Finetti,65 who saw more clearly than others that the New Science, however innocent in intent, was by no means innocuous in effect. To admit the feral state as the starting-point for the rise of humanity, and to make the development of society a matter of internal dialectic, was to put the entire structure of Catholic thought in jeopardy. He saw too that Vico’s theory of the origin of religion was Lucretian, not Christian; and that the disintegration of the personality of Homer and of other heroic characters would open the way to the ultimate disintegration of Moses, the patriarchs and prophets. Duni’s defense of Vico, on the other hand, was incidental to his application of the principles of the New Science to Roman history, and his adaptation and development of Vico’s philosophy of law. He has some fine pages on the way in which the class struggle, when apparently resolved in its political guise, openly assumes the economic form.66 In a dedicatory letter to Tanucci in his Essay on Universal Jurisprudence, he has these memorable words, expressing feelings not peculiar to himself, but common to nearly all the Italian epigoni of Vico in the eighteenth century, and to many in the nineteenth:
I must confess to your excellency the sin of having taken Vico’s works in my hands a thousand times, and a thousand times turned away from them lest my talent should be taken captive. But then, whether by the exigencies of my profession, or by the surprising pleasure which overcame me whenever I succeeded in penetrating his thought to its depths, or whether by both together, I was led to banish from my sight all books but his, and I determined, in spite of every natural aversion, to drink the bitter draught until it coursed in my veins, and my mind renewed its youth with the joy of being able in good faith to glory in having grasped something of the truth.67
But neither Duni nor anyone else who borrowed this or that from Vico in the pre-revolutionary period was able to free himself altogether from the prevailing rationalist temper, to grasp Vico’s thought as an integral whole, or even to place himself at its living center. Not until the enlightenment had run its full course, not until a social movement arose for which Vico’s historical vision was a vital necessity, was there widespread serious study and adequate comprehension of it. This movement was the post-revolutionary reaction, whose foremost representatives were the Federalists in America, Burke in England, De Maistre in France, and Vincenzo Cuoco in Italy. The transmission lines from Vico to the Federalists and Burke have not been traced; but De Maistre studied him and quoted him in an important passage of his Considerations on France (1796) and elsewhere, and it has been shown that his ideas were largely Vichian;68 and Cuoco’s Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799 (1800) was consciously thought out from the center of Vico’s vision. The Neapolitan republicans, he argued, had acted under the illusion that they could transfer the French Revolution to southern Italy; that a politico-social movement which had grown out of conditions peculiar to a single country could be grafted onto a country where those conditions were absent. This illusion was nourished by that of the French themselves, who “mistook as an effect of philosophy what was really the effect of the political circumstances in which their nation found itself.” The philosophy had been imported easily enough, but even it could not really sink its roots into Italian soil, for Italy had already its native political philosophy in Machiavelli and Vico, who had provided in advance the necessary corrective of the abstract formulas of the rationalists and Encyclopedists, from which Montesquieu alone of French thinkers had been relatively free. Italian unity could only be achieved by the Italians themselves attaining a national consciousness reflecting the circumstances and the intellectual traditions of Italy, not those of France. Croce has called this book of Cuoco’s “the first vigorous manifestation of Vichian thought, anti-abstract and historical, the beginning of the new historiography founded on the conception of the organic development of peoples, and of the new politics of national liberalism, at once revolutionary and moderate.”69
Cuoco was the ablest of a group of Neapolitans who became Vico missionaries to northern Italy and France after the failure of the revolution at Naples. Their enthusiasm was communicated to Monti, Foscolo, and Manzoni, and gave the impetus for a series of new editions of Vico’s works, beginning with that of the New Science at Milan in 1801. One of their number, Francesco Lomonaco, published a short life of Vico. Another, Francesco Salfi, reviewed the new editions in the Revue Encyclopédique; and discussed Vico in books and essays in French, one of which contained an analysis of his doctrines which was indirectly (as we shall see) the means of bringing to Jules Michelet his first acquaintance with them. Another, Pietro de Angelis, aroused the interest of Victor Cousin, was introduced by him to Michelet, and put the New Science in his hands. De Angelis spent his last years in Buenos Aires, which became the chief American center of interest in Vico. Cuoco himself addressed a letter on Vico’s doctrines to De Gérando when he was at work on his Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie; gave them prominence in a series of articles in the Giornale italiano of Milan; and spoke of their significance for Italian culture in his recommendations for the reform of public instruction under Murat’s regime.
If Vico’s reputation had hitherto been predominantly Neapolitan, it now became Italian and international; and the New Science became the book of the Risorgimento. Wherever Italian patriots went—Foscolo, Prati and Mazzini to England, Ferrari and Gioberti to France and Belgium—they carried it in hand or in mind. Each succeeding school of philosophy—the liberal Catholic idealism of Rosmini and Gioberti, the positivism of Ferrari, Cattaneo, Siciliani, Villari and Ardigò, the Hegelian idealism of Spaventa and De Sanctis—had its interpretation of Vico. Ferrari edited his works (1835–37) and made “Vico and Italy” a war cry of nationalism. Prati lent the New Science to Coleridge at Highgate. Mazzini wrote Ugoni from London in 1839 that if Ferrari’s edition were at hand he would attempt an article in The British and Foreign Review on the doctrines of Vico, “unknown or misunderstood here.”70 Spaventa in his Italian Philosophy in its Relations with European Philosophy (1862) traced “the circulation of Italian thought” through the two main movements of modern philosophy, the Cartesian of which Bruno and Campanella were precursors and the Kantian of which Vico was, returning in each case to Italy to complete the cycle. Since Vico was “the true precursor of all German thought,” the Italian reception of Hegelianism was but its home-coming.71 Siciliani devoted the first book of his Renewal of Positive Philosophy in Italy (1871) to a “history of the New Science and critique of the critics, interpreters and expositors of Vico’s doctrines.” The unification of Italy once achieved, the interest in Vico declined for a generation (except among positivists, sociologists and jurists), but was revived and augmented in the first decade of the present century by Croce, who in his Aesthetic interpreted the New Science as “philosophy of the spirit, with particular amplification given to the philosophy of the aesthetic spirit,” and whose own philosophy has developed pari passu with continuous reinterpretation of Vico’s.72 More recently, Vico was restored to good Catholic standing, and was unhappily again for a time a political symbol; he and Mazzini were “the two greatest forerunners of Fascism.”73
MEANWHILE, by paths that are still but partially known, Vico’s reputation was slowly spreading in Germany, where one might have looked for the readiest reception and the most rapid diffusion of his ideas. Hamann, “The Mage of the North,” was engaged on economics in 1777, and in one or another of the Italian works on the subject he came upon references to Vico’s New Science. Supposing that the science in question was the political economy of the Physiocrats, he procured a copy from Florence and found in it not economics but philology. So we learn from a letter74 briefly describing it to his disciple Herder, who therefore knew of Vico before writing his Ideas toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–87), though he first discusses him in his Letters in Furtherance of Humanity (1797).75 In the meantime Herder had traveled in Italy in 1789 and gained more for his philosophy of history in his first eight days at Naples than in three or four months at Rome; at Naples he had found “men quite different from those at Rome” and “quite different writings.”76 Perhaps he was prepared for this by Goethe, who had secured his appointment as court preacher at Weimar, for Goethe had visited Naples in March, 1787, and Filangieri had there made him acquainted with the New Science of
an old author in whose unfathomable depths these modern law-enthusiasts find the greatest stimulus and edification. His name is Giambattista Vico; they prefer him to Montesquieu. Glancing rapidly through the book which they presented to me as a sacred treasure, I saw that it contained sibylline presentiments of the good and just that would or should hereafter be realized, based on serious contemplation of life and tradition. It is a happy thing for a people to have such a patriarch [Aeltervater]. The writings of Hamann will one day appear in this light to the Germans.77
Goethe had taken the book back to Germany, and he lent it to Jacobi in 1792. Jacobi was sufficiently interested to secure some of Vico’s other writings. In the Ancient Wisdom of the Italians he found a passage in which he discerned an anticipation of Kant. In his On Divine Things and their Revelation (1811) he called attention for the first time to this relationship, and quoted the passage, somewhat abridged and paraphrased.
The kernel of the Kantian philosophy is the … truth that we comprehend an object only so far as we are able to call it into being before us in thought, to create it in understanding…. Long before Kant, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Vico wrote at Naples: “In geometry we demonstrate, because we create; before we demonstrate in physics, we must be able to create there also. Hence those people are to be condemned for impious curiosity who try to prove God a priori. The clarity of metaphysical truth is like that of light, which we know only by means of things that are opaque; for we see not light but light-reflecting objects. Physical things are opaque; they have form and boundary, and in them we see the light of metaphysical truth.”78
(Three years later Coleridge lifted this quotation from Jacobi and adapted its context in his Theory of Life, so that the earliest known reference to Vico in English literature arrived via Filangieri, Goethe, and Jacobi.)
When Friedrich August Wolf published his Prolegomena ad Homerum in 1795 and gave the impetus to nineteenth-century higher criticism, he had no first-hand knowledge of Vico’s more brilliant “discovery of the true Homer” sixty-five years before, though its results may have reached him indirectly through Wood or through Zoega and Heyne. Vico’s name first attracted his attention several years later in the dissertations accompanying Cesarotti’s translation of the Iliad. Wolf made other efforts to find the New Science before applying to Cesarotti himself, who sent him a copy in 1802; for Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote him from Berlin in 1801 that the library did not have it, and that Professor Buttmann, the Greek philologist, knew nothing of it or its author. Wolf published in his Museum der Alterthumswissenschaft in 1807 an article entitled “G. B. Vico on Homer,” grudgingly acknowledging Vico’s priority but showing no understanding of the importance of Vico’s general theory of poetry, of which his Homeric criticism was only an application.
A long and lively controversy was initiated by the Swiss philologist J. K. Orelli in an article on “Niebuhr and Vico” in 1816, pointing out that the latter had still more wonderfully anticipated the views of Niebuhr than those of Wolf.79 From Niebuhr there was no response, but his friends took steps to remove any suspicion of plagiarism. As Savigny put it in his memoirs of Niebuhr in 1839,
Vico, with his profound genius, stood alone among his contemporaries, a stranger in his own country, overlooked or derided, although now the attempt is made to claim him as a national possession. Among such unfavorable circumstances his spirit could not come to full fruition. It is true that one finds in him scattered thoughts on Roman history resembling Niebuhr’s. But these ideas are like flashes of lightning in a dark night, by which the traveler is led further astray rather than brought back to his path. No one could profit from them who had not already found the truth in his own way. Niebuhr in particular learned to know him only late and through others.80
Besides Orelli and Savigny, and perhaps the writings of Duni on Roman history, these others included Leopardi, who was befriended by Niebuhr in Rome in the eighteen-twenties. Leopardi’s Neapolitan friend and editor Antonio Ranieri, speaking at the unveiling of a statue of Vico at Naples in 1861, reminded his hearers that in the interpretation of early Roman history Vico had come to be generally called the grandfather and Niebuhr the grandson (the father being Duni), and then related that
Giacomo Leopardi, while still a young man, was living at Rome in modest quarters. Niebuhr discovered and visited him there, and later made him known to the German public. But Giacomo, who had long been vexed by the unhappy silence of his visitor, finally took heart and called Vico his grandfather; and Niebuhr maintained from then on a still more unhappy silence, because his painful feeling of being in this point only a grandson sealed his mouth.
A German translation of the New Science, with Vico’s autobiography prefixed, was published by W. E. Weber in 1822. In the same year Savigny, discerning the affinity of Vico’s historical jurisprudence to his own, gave a copy of the first edition of the Universal Law to K. H. Müller, who published a translation in 1854, with notes comparing Vico’s doctrines with those of Hegel, Niebuhr, Savigny and other German writers.
When Eduard Gans in 1837 published Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history, he reviewed in his preface the various attempts at such a philosophy before Hegel, and found only three to be compared with his; namely, those of Vico, Herder, and Friedrich von Schlegel. German scholars continued to interest themselves in Vico at intervals, but neither Mommsen nor any considerable historian save Fridegar Mone acknowledged indebtedness to him; even Windelband’s history of modern philosophy barely mentioned his name; and excepting an able monograph by the German Catholic Karl Werner (1881) there was no thoroughgoing study or just appreciation of his works until Croce’s Vico revival spread to Germany. Croce dedicated his now classic exposition of Vico’s philosophy (1911) to Windelband and sent him a copy along with a set of Vico’s works. Windelband promptly added to the fifth edition of his history a long footnote giving a rounded though summary account of Vico’s doctrines, which showed that he had read Croce’s book but not that he had read Vico. In the first winter of the First World War Windelband lectured at Heidelberg on the philosophy of history, using Herder and Vico as representatives of two conceptions of it, the former that of universal history, the latter that of the laws exemplified by all particular histories. Windelband still referred to Croce for his understanding of Vico.
Especially interesting in Vico [he said] is his cyclical theory of historical process, with its corsi and ricorsi, and very acute and just is his observation that once a people has risen from barbarism to civilization it foils back into a new barbarism which is worse than the first. We are today in an excellent position to confirm his observation by the comparative method, since we have to do with the first sort of barbarism in our antagonists on the one side [Russia] and with the second in those on the other [France and England].81
The gradual recovery of sanity after the war brought a series of sober and valuable contributions to Vico studies by younger German scholars influenced by Croce—until Nazi scholarship followed the Fascist lead in deriving their common philosophy from Vico through Sorel.82
IN 1728 Montesquieu was traveling in Italy, with the Persian Letters behind him and the Greatness and Decline of the Romans and the Spirit of the Lews still ahead. At Venice he met Antonio Conti, who was then in the first flush of his enthusiasm for the New Science. He probably showed it to Montesquieu and gave him some account of its leading ideas; and we know he urged him to procure a copy at Naples. Montesquieu may have met the author during his stay there in the following year, and received from his hands the copy of the first edition which was preserved in the library at La Brède until its dispersal a few years ago. The analogies between his principles and Vico’s have persuaded some scholars that he studied the book, and an occasional verbal echo suggests that he had at least opened it here and there; but he nowhere refers to it, and until a careful comparative study has been made, a conclusion seems unwarranted.
Rousseau was at Venice for eighteen months in 1743–44 as secretary to the French embassy; and he there conceived the design of a great book on Political Institutions. The third and definitive edition of the New Science appeared early in 1744; Venice was the greatest book market of Italy, and the propaganda of Conti, Porcía and Lodoli had made it the chief center of interest in Vico’s major work. It is probable, therefore, that Rousseau’s attention was drawn to it as having a bearing on his own design, and he may have bought a copy of the third edition. As early as 1749 he began work on his Essay on the Origin of Languages, in the first six chapters of which he repeated the main points of Vico’s theory—mute languages, hieroglyphics, the primacy of poetry over prose, of figurative language over language proper, and so on—and took a view of Homer resembling Vico’s.84 First intended for the Encyclopedia, and then as an appendix to his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, it was gradually developed into an essay preparatory to his greater work on Political Institutions, and the very idea of using the origin of language as a clue to that of civil society may have come from Vico.
Ferdinando Galiani was secretary to the Neapolitan embassy at Paris for ten years beginning in 1759, and some traces of Vichian ideas in the writings of Diderot and his other Parisian friends are perhaps due to him. He represented Vico as a forerunner of Montesquieu, and said, half in jest, that “Vico dared attempt to ford the quagmire of metaphysics, and although he was bogged down he gave footing to a more fortunate thinker on the spirit of the laws of the nations.” When Boulanger’s three-volume L’antiquité devoilié par ses usages was posthumously published by Holbach in 1766, Galiani wrote to Tanucci: “The Frenchman has plundered Vico without citing him; but there are many here who have learned of the plagiarism and who ask me for the New Science.” On his visit to Paris in the same year, Beccaria must have spoken of the New Science at Holbach’s, for a few months later Morellet, the French translator of his Treatise on Crimes and Punishments, wrote to him: “You will remember that you promised a copy of Vico to me, and also to the Baron. Please send them at your first opportunity.”
The Marquis of Chastellux published in 1772 a two-volume work On Public Felicity, or Considerations on the Condition of Humanity in the Various Epochs of History. Voltaire placed it above the Spirit of the Laws, and enriched his copy with notes which were included in a later edition. Chastellux had been in Naples, and an Italian translation of his work was published there in 1782. Though it owed perhaps more to Muratori’s book with a similar main title, it followed Vico on the history and primitive government of Rome; and Cuoco later wrote that Chastellux “understood Vico’s doctrines better than anyone else.” An English translation of this work was published in 1774. As early as 1759 Chastellux had been one of the circle of Hume’s French admirers, and Hume established especially cordial relations with him during his stay in France in 1763–65. Although Vico is not mentioned in the published letters of Chastellux to Hume,85 this may have been one avenue of transmission of Vico’s ideas to the Scottish school.
Condillac’s aesthetics may have owed something to Vico, directly or through Warburton. Of De Maistre we have already spoken. Fauriel, historian of Provence, friend and mentor of Madame de Staël, of Cabanis, Manzoni, Guizot and Thierry, made a study of the New Science in 1799, and his various historical and critical works show its influence. He later discussed Vico and the new aesthetics with Manzoni, who drew a famous comparison between Vico and Muratori in his Discourse on Lombard History. Guizot, soliciting an article for the Archives philosophiques in 1817, wrote Fauriel: “If you have time to do one on Vico too, that would be splendid.” As late as 1838, an article on “Vico and His Times,” submitted by Fauriel for a friend, was accepted by the Revue des deux mondes, but for some reason was not published. Renan did not greatly exaggerate when he said in 1855 that Fauriel was the man who had put into circulation the greatest number of new ideas in the first half of the century; and his lifelong interest in Vico was the source of no small part of them.
But the decisive event for Vico’s European reputation in the nineteenth century was Michelet’s discovery of the New Science in 1824.86 It is a curious accident of history that this discovery was indirectly due to a Scottish philosopher who nowhere mentions Vico, though he has been suspected of borrowing from him his theory of the certainty of mathematics as resting not on axioms but on definitions. As early as 1821 Michelet was reading Shaftesbury, Reid and Stewart, all three in English, along with Gibbon and Hallam in French translations. While meditating on Gibbon and Stewart, he conceived the idea of a history of civilization reconstructed from the languages of the various peoples. In January, 1824, in Buchon’s terminal notes to his translation of Stewart’s General View of the Progress of Metaphysical, Ethical and Political Philosophy since the Revival of Letters, he found an account of Vico drawn from Salfi’s essay on Filangieri, and a fragment by Cousin on the philosophy of history. These moved him to seek the acquaintance of Salfi and Cousin. Cousin encouraged him to study and translate Vico, and introduced him to De Angelis, who gave him the New Science and other works of Vico, and to Quinet, who was translating Herder at Cousin’s suggestion. By July of the same year, Michelet had learned enough Italian to read Vico, and begun a translation. In the same months he read Ferguson’s Essay on the Progress of Civil Society (1767) and Priestley’s Essay on Government (1768), especially its chapter on “The Progress of Civil Societies to a state of greater perfection.” Of this critical year in his intellectual development Michelet later noted: “1824. Vico. Effort, infernal shades, grandeur, the golden bough.” “From 1824 on, I was seized by a frenzy caught from Vico, an incredible intoxication with his great historical principle.” Three years later he published an abridged translation of the New Science under the title Principes de la philosophie de l’histoire, and a brilliant sketch of Vico’s life and work in the Biographie Universelle, concluding with this sentence: “No English or Scottish writer, so far as I know, has mentioned Vico, with the exception of the author of a recent brochure on the state of studies in Germany and Italy.”
In the summer of 1828 Victor Cousin returned in triumph to the Sorbonne and delivered before audiences of two thousand a series of lectures on the history of philosophy, with the result that, as Sir William Hamilton observed in the Edinburgh Review in the following year, “oral discussion of philosophy awakened in Paris and in France an interest unexampled since the days of Abelard.” The eleventh lecture was devoted to “The Historians of Humanity,’’ Bossuet, Vico and Herder. “The fundamental character of the New Science,” said Cousin, “is the introduction into history of a point of view purely human.”
Religion also forms, according to Vico, a part of the state and of society; while, according to Bossuet, the state forms a part of religion. According to Vico, religion relates to humanity, but according to Bossuet, the services of humanity are entirely at the disposal of religion; the point of view has completely changed, and this was, in my opinion, an immense step in the progress of the science of history, of which the ultimate aim is to cause everything to reenter into humanity…. Neither ought we any more to forget that Vico was the first who, instead of suffering himself to be imposed upon by the splendor that encircles certain names, was bold enough to submit them to a strict examination, and who has taken from many illustrious personages in history their personal greatness, in order to give it back to humanity itself, to the time, to the century, in which these persons made their appearance.
After indicating the respects in which Herder marked a further advance, he said: “These arc the works that I would recommend to my young hearers.… I congratulate myself on having encouraged my two young friends, Michelet and Quinet, to give to France Vico and Herder.”
Michelet’s abridged translation of the New Science, from which Cousin’s own knowledge of Vico was derived, was reissued in 1835, accompanied by translations of Vico’s autobiography and some of his minor works and letters. Of this translation Robert Flint said in 1884:
Nowhere out of Italy has Vico been studied with so much intelligence and sympathy as in France. What of European reputation he possesses, is very largely due to M. Michelet’s “Œuvres Choisies de Vico.” Michelet most wisely renounced the idea of a literal rendering, and applied himself to reproduce with faithfulness and vividness the substance and spirit of his author. He so succeeded that the great majority even of persons capable of reading the original will find it much more profitable to read his translation, itself a work of genius.87
That, in fact, is what nineteenth-century readers of Vico did. Weber’s German translation (1822) and a later French one by the Princess Belgioioso (1844), both more literal than Michelet’s, were little read; but even Italians found Michelet’s translation more intelligible than the original.
Meanwhile Michelet had published in 1831 a history of the Roman Republic and an introduction to universal history, and begun publication of his monumental history of France. In the preface to the Roman history he paid a tribute to Vico which he repeated in the preface to the Œuvres choisies.
In the vast system of the founder of the metaphysics of history, there already exist, at least in germ, all the labors of modern scholarship. Like Wolf, he said that the Iliad was the work of a people, its learned work and last expression, after many centuries of inspired poetry. Like Creuzer and Goerres he interpreted the heroic and divine figures of primitive history as ideas and symbols. Before Montesquieu and Gans he showed how law springs from the customs of a people and represents faithfully every step of its history. What Niebuhr was to find by vast research, Vico divined; he restored patrician Rome and made its curiae and gentes live again. Certainly, if Pythagoras recalled that in a previous life he had fought beneath the walls of Troy, these illustrious Germans might have remembered that they had all formerly lived in Vico. All the giants of criticism are already contained, with room to spare, in the little pandemonium of the New Science.
The basic idea of the system is bold; bolder perhaps than the author himself suspected. It touches all the great political and religious questions that agitate the world. The instinct of Vico’s adversaries did not fail them here; hate is clairvoyant. Fortunately the book was dedicated to Clement XII. The apocalypse of the New Science was placed upon the altar until time should break open its seven seals.
The text of the New Science is this: Humanity is its own work. God acts upon it, but by it. Humanity is divine, but no one man is divine. The heroes of myth—Hercules who thrusts mountains aside, Lycurgus and Romulus, swift legislators who accomplish in a lifetime the long work of centuries—are creations of the people’s thought. God alone is great. When man craved god-men, he had to condense generations into an individual person; to combine in a single hero the conceptions of a whole poetic cycle. Thus it was that he fashioned his historical idols—a Romulus, a Numa. Before these gigantic phantoms the people remained prostrate. The philosopher bids them rise. “That which you adore,” he says to them, “is yourselves, your own conceptions.”
The introduction to universal history was composed at top speed after the revolution of July, 1830; dashed off, he later said, “on the burning pavements of Paris.” It opened with these words:
With the world began a war which will end only with the world: the war of man against nature, of spirit against matter, of liberty against fatality. History is nothing other than the record of this interminable struggle.
This view of history as a struggle of liberty against fatality, which Michelet identified with Vico’s conception of man making his own history, became the dominant theme of his great history of France, which was inspired by the same July revolution but was forty years in the writing. Looking back on his labors in his preface of 1869, Michelet wrote: “I had no master but Vico. His principle of living force, of humanity creating itself, made both my book and my teaching.”
We have seen that there were others working on Vico before Michelet’s translation first appeared. Of these perhaps the most enthusiastic was Ballanche, who in his Essays on Social Palingenesis (1823–30) adapted Vico’s view of the relation of the origin of language to that of society, called him “one of the most penetrating minds that ever existed,” and said that if he had been better known in the eighteenth century he would have exercised a moderating and beneficial influence on the subsequent social revolutions. But it was due to Michelet more than anyone else that intellectual France teemed with Vichians, conscious and unconscious, toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Philosophers, historians, jurists, classical scholars and critics did him honor and invoked his name to bless their speculations; poets and novelists found inspiration in him; he fired the imagination of young men with the most varied ambitions. Of all this work influenced by Vico through Michelet perhaps the most permanently valuable was that of Fustel de Coulanges on the ancient city and the origins of feudalism.
Not the least of Michelet’s services was his sympathetic interpretation of contemporary German thought. It was his work on Vico that opened the way for him to the study and appreciation of Wolf, Creuzer, Goerres, Niebuhr, Savigny, Gans, and above all of Jakob Grimm. His absorption of Savigny, Gans and Grimm was particularly important for the development of historical jurisprudence in France. By viewing all these German thinkers in a Vichian perspective, by conceiving them as continuers of Vico’s work, nursing to maturity the seeds he had sown, giving body to his visions, Michelet was able to discern the relations among them, and to interpret each by the others. Thus Vico served through Michelet as a mediator between German and French culture.88
OUR ignorance is most profound in the case of Great Britain and America. There is a certain irony in this, for Vico obviously hoped for a more favorable reception of his doctrines in England than elsewhere abroad. Of his “four authors,” Bacon was the one to whom he owed the stimulus to treat the list of sciences as something incomplete, to be enlarged and supplemented by new sciences. He admired the Baconian method, “so fruitfully employed by the English ever since in experimental philosophy,” supposed himself to have “transferred it from the physical to the human and civil order,” and hoped on that ground that his New Science would recommend itself to English readers. Even the verum factum formula of his early theory of knowledge was perhaps suggested by Bacon’s doctrine of the relation between knowledge and power. He praised the De veritate of Lord Herbert of Cherbury as applying the method of “topics” to metaphysics. Selden was for him one of “the three princes” of the doctrine of natural law. Hobbes helped him to extend his theory of knowledge to history, and set for him the problem of which his new science was the solution. He acknowledged the “magnanimous force” of Hobbes’s attempted solution in De cive, and liked to quote his saying that if he had read as much as other men he would have known as little. He ranked Newton with Leibniz as “the two foremost geniuses of this age.”89
A scholar moved to enlighten our ignorance might well begin with an inventory of English visitors to Naples in Vico’s lifetime. Gilbert Burnet, for instance, was there in 1685, and his son William (later governor of New York) in the early years of the following century. Vico probably met them both, and seems to have drawn on the former’s published letters to Robert Boyle in his history of the conspiracy of Macchia.90 Addison was there in 1701, and the many editions of his Remarks on Italy gave prevalence to a low opinion of contemporary Italian culture, which was not decisively challenged until the heyday of Romanticism, and which effectively discharged borrowers from Vico of the obligation to acknowledge their debts. Shaftesbury spent the last fifteen months of his life at Naples in 1711–13, befriended by Vico’s friends Valletta and Doria, on whose behalf he transmitted to Burnet and Newton “some small literary works”91 which probably included Vico’s Treatise on Method and Ancient Wisdom of the Italians. (Vico later introduced his second New Science with an allegorical engraving and commentary thereon, a procedure perhaps suggested by Shaftesbury’s in his Second Characters.) Berkeley was there for some months in 1717 and 1718,92 and Vico’s friend Doria was among the first serious critics of Berkeley’s idealism. When the first New Science appeared in 1725, some Englishmen who were in Naples bought up all the copies they could find and sent them to London. “They well understood,” says Lomonaco, “the profit that might be drawn from it, both for literature and for philosophy.”93 Vico himself sent a copy to Newton, which may have reached him about a year before his death.94
The projected Venetian edition of the New Science was intended by Conti (who had been made a member of the Royal Society of London on Newton’s motion) to reach a wider public in England as well as on the continent. Whether he took any steps in behalf of the second and third editions published at Naples, we do not yet know. It is scarcely credible that the Vichian ideas scattered through the writings of Blackwell, Ferguson, Hume, Wollaston, Warburton, Hurd, Monboddo, Wood, Blair, Duff, Mason, Brown, Lowth, Warton and Burke, are due solely to their having been in this or that respect animae naturaliter Vicianae, or to a gradual unfolding of Shaftesbury’s seminal thoughts, or even to an indirect and diluted Vichian influence through Italian and French authors mentioned in previous sections.95 Hume’s natural history of religion, for instance, is up to a point eminently Vichian. So is Blair’s view that the “times which we call barbarous” were most “favorable to the poetical spirit,” and that “imagination was most glowing and animated in the first ages of society.” So is Monboddo’s theory of the origin and progress of language. So are many such passages as the following in Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society, which had an influence in England and Germany out of all proportion to its merits.
On this scene [the temperate zone], mankind have twice, within the compass of history, ascended from rude beginnings to very high degrees of refinement….
No constitution is formed by concert, no government is copied from a plan…. The seeds of every form are lodged in human nature; they spring up and ripen with the season…. We are therefore to receive with caution the traditionary histories of ancient legislators, and founders of states….
If nations actually borrow from their neighbours, they probably borrow only what they are nearly in a condition to have invented themselves….
When we attend to the language which savages employ on any solemn occasion, it appears that man is a poet by nature….96
Yet no one has so far reported any evidence of direct acquaintance with Vico’s writings on the part of any of these men, or indeed so much as a passing allusion to him in any English book, journal or private letter of the eighteenth century. Here, then, is a virgin field for students of the history of ideas.
So far as our own research has disclosed, the earliest avowed English disseminator of Vichian ideas was Samuel Taylor Coleridge.97 He first quoted Vico in his Theory of Life in 1816, but this was not published until 1848, and in any case the quotation was borrowed from Jacobi. But in 1825 an Italian exile, Gioacchino de’ Prati, lent him a set of the sixth edition of the New Science, printed at Milan in 1816, in three volumes of which the first contained the autobiography in place of an introduction. On May 14 Coleridge wrote to Prati:
I am more and more delighted with G. B. Vico, and if I had (which thank God’s good grace I have not) the least drop of Author’s blood in my veins, I should twenty times successively in the perusal of the first volume (I have not yet begun the second) have exclaimed: “Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixere.”
He chose a motto from the autobiography for his Aids to Reflection, which was passing through the press at the time. He planned a translation of Bacon’s Novum Organum, to be illustrated by Vichian parallels. He urged Prati to write “a series of Critical and biographical Sketches of the most remarkable revolutionary minds,” beginning with “a spirited Sketch of Vico’s Life and great Work,” and offered to assist him with his English. From 1825 until his death in 1834, his letters and table talk give evidence of further reading and continued interest in Vico. He was impressed by Vico’s theory of the origin of language. On one occasion he drew a parallel between the condition of the plebs at Rome as represented by Vico and that of the negroes under the West India planters. But more than anything else it was Vico’s “discovery of the true Homer” that he praised and defended, and it was apparently by his instigation that his son-in-law Henry Nelson Coleridge included a translation of that section of the New Science in the second edition of his Introductions to the Study of the Greek Poets in 1834.
Coleridge’s influence, reinforced by Michelet’s, was responsible for much of the interest in Vico on the part of English writers in the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. The two groups to whom he most appealed were the leaders of the Broad Church movement on the one hand, and the positivists and “rationalists” on the other. The former were largely intellectual heirs of Coleridge. His Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, in which he took up the Bible to read it for the first time like any other book, and which laid down the line the Broad Churchmen were to follow in Biblical criticism, was composed about the time that Coleridge was reading Vico, and went some way toward applying to the Bible and to Hebrew religion the principles Vico had applied to gentile literature and religions.
In this first group we may count Thomas Arnold, the first English historian to acknowledge indebtedness to Vico. His famous essay on “The Social Progress of States” was first published as an appendix to his edition of Thucydides in 1830. The thesis of the essay was that “states, like individuals, go through certain changes in a certain order, and are subject at different stages of their course to certain peculiar disorders”; that “the largest portion of that history which we commonly call ancient is practically modern, as it describes society in a state analogous to that in which it now is; while, on the other hand, much of what is called modern history is practically ancient, as it relates to a state of things which has passed away.”
Arnold shows “how the popular party of an earlier period becomes the antipopular of a later; because the tendency of society is to become more and more liberal, and as the ascendency of wealth is a more popular principle than the ascendency of nobility, so it is less popular than the ascendency of numbers.” There are thus two critical periods, the transitions from aristocracy to plutocracy, and from plutocracy to democracy. In the latter case, the struggle “is between property and numbers, and wherever it has come to a crisis, I know not that it has in any instance terminated favorably. Such was the state of Greece in the time of Thucydides; of Rome during the last century of the commonwealth; and such has been the state of England since the revolution of 1688.” “The final struggle here only takes place when the real differences between the contending parties have reached the widest point of separation; when the intermediate gradations of society are absorbed in one or other of the two extremes, and the state is divided only between the two irreconcilable opposites of luxury and beggary.”
Arnold in 1830, unlike Marx and Engels in 1848, wanted to avoid such a revolution by purging the existing system of its abuses and preparing the way for a gradual granting of power to the working class in a future comfortably remote. His brilliant essay is, indeed, as has recently been observed,98 the perfect analysis of English social movement on the eve of the Reform Bill, and there were few men in England who could have made it with so much discernment.
But the whole conception is adapted from Vico, and depends in particular on Vico’s insight that “the old Homeric monarchies were in fact an instance of power depending on blood, and therefore of the ascendency of nobility. They were like the feudal monarchies of modern Europe, essentially aristocracies, in which the separation of all the chiefs or nobles from the inferior people was far more strongly marked than the elevation of the king above his nobles.”
This ascendency, enjoyed in the earliest state of society by noble birth, has been traced in various countries, and its phenomena most successfully investigated, by Giovanni Battista Vico, in his Principi di Scienza nuova; a work disfigured indeed by some strange extravagancies, but in its substance so profound and so striking, that the little celebrity which it has obtained out of Italy is one of the most remarkable facts in literary history. Vico’s work was published in 1725, yet I scarcely remember ever to have seen it noticed by any subsequent writers who have touched upon the same subject even down to our own times.
The last sentence contains an implied rebuke of Niebuhr, to whom, after Vico, Arnold was chiefly indebted.
The Foreign Review published in the same year (1830) an article on Vico, dwelling on his anticipations of Wolf and Niebuhr and showing that on some points of difference the subsequent discovery of Cicero’s De republica had vindicated Vico. In the next year Henry Hart Milman made Henry Nelson Coleridge’s book the occasion for an extended review of the Homeric controversy in the Quarterly Review. Vico’s “bold and original conceptions on many subjects connected with the history of mankind are now emerging into light,” he said, and the New Science, “coinciding in a remarkable manner with the tone of thinking prevalent among the continental writers of the present day, many of whose speculations it had anticipated, is acquiring a tardy fame, and winning its way to something like an European reputation.” And in 1833 Coleridge’s disciples Hare and Thirlwall, the translators of Niebuhr, published in their Philological Museum a long and able article on Vico by John Kenrick, calling attention to his anticipation not merely of Wolf and Niebuhr but also of Warburton’s exposure of the widespread notion that hieroglyphics were “an invention of the priests or philosophers of Egypt, to conceal a sublime doctrine from the knowledge of the vulgar, or keep them in subjection by maintaining a monopoly of science.” Kenrick leaned somewhat on Michelet, and observed that “whoever is not in love with difficulty for its own sake, will do well to seek his knowledge of Vico’s system in M. Michelet’s work; for Vico himself is the Heraclitus of modern philosophers.” This article contained much the best exposition and criticism of Vico’s doctrines in English prior to Flint’s book in 1884, and is still useful.
Intimately associated with Arnold, Hare, Thirlwall, and other Broad Church leaders, first in Rome and later in London, was Baron Bunsen, who had married Frances Waddington in 1817. He had been secretary to the Prussian embassy at Rome under Niebuhr, later succeeded him as ambassador, and was Prussian minister to England from 1842 to 1854. In the successive versions of his philosophy of history he did less than justice to Vico because of an exaggerated notion of the originality of the German thinkers, but paid tribute to him as having recognized, especially in the history of legal institutions, “at once a divine order and a process of evolution intelligible to our reason.”
From our point of view, the fact is of most decisive significance that while the Romanic prophets, Vico and Montesquieu, in laying the foundations of their theories of the universe, do indeed acknowledge God and Christianity, yet, in raising their superstructure, they take their stand exclusively upon law, and not upon religion. They stand on the defensive against the claims of their Church and Theology. This is the universal and necessary attitude of Romanic philosophers towards the popular religion. As laymen, they have no right to know much about it, still less to enquire for themselves into anything affecting it; and, at all events, must not attempt to discuss it from their philosophical point of view. Hence, they come to find themselves out of harmony with the Semitic element and with dogmatic theology; both which, nevertheless, form the sources of a considerable proportion of the jurisprudence of Christian Europe.99
In 1862 Coleridge’s disciple Frederick Denison Maurice, influential leader of Broad Church thought and of Christian Socialism, and founder of the Working Men’s College and of Queen’s College for women, published a history of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, the first and so far the only English history to give an account of Vico fairly proportioned to that of other philosophers, and to place him in the general movement of modern philosophy.100 This history was first undertaken in 1835 for the Encyclopœdia Metropolitana, which Coleridge had designed and for which he wrote in 1817 the “Preliminary Treatise on Method.” Maurice’s son says that from 1835 onwards “this article, as it gradually developed in future editions into his complete treatise on the subject, occupied him, with short intervals, throughout almost his entire life, either in preparation, study, writing or revision.”101 The first and shortest version, which appeared in the 1845 edition of the Encyclopœdia, does not include the account of Vico, which made its first appearance in the entirely rewritten and separately published edition of Maurice’s history in 1862. He explains Vico’s isolation and lack of immediate influence by his increasing absorption in an investigation of the common law of nations which had no point of attachment to the practical concerns of his time and place.
His method of pursuing it has made him of immense use to later times. But he had to make great sacrifices, and not only sacrifices of immediate interest and reputation, that he might engage in the pursuit…. We should like to hear the voice of the Neapolitan citizen rising above that of the cosmopolite…. That he could be what he was without a country; that he could even claim for Italy something of its old right to speak as a witness for all the nations, not for herself specially; should increase the admiration with which we regard him. But we may partly understand why Montesquieu, who, amidst all his general studies, was essentially the nobleman of the South of France—why Voltaire, who, with all his cosmopolitanism, was the oracle of Paris and the model of its writers, should have necessarily obtained an influence in their day which could not be reached by a more elevated and profound thinker, who only appealed to Europe generally, who spoke of the demands of mankind, without being attached to any definite circle of men.
When Maurice comes to Herder he is in a position to say:
It will strike our readers that Herder had not quite a right to speak of the road which he proposed to travel as one that had never been travelled before. Vico had surely attempted a philosophy or science of humanity as much as any man in later or older days had attempted a philosophy of nature or of mind. He does not bring to that attempt the information … which Herder has amassed…. But … as a compensation for the encyclopedic knowledge of the German, there is in the Neapolitan a penetration into the meaning of signs and symbols, a critical genius, and a profound reverence for the intuitions of different races, which we cannot think has any parallel in his successor. In our day the influence of Vico has been far more felt by other countries, and we should suppose by Germany, than that of the author of the Ideas.
Of the second group of English writers interested in Vico, the positivists and rationalists, we may speak more briefly. John Stuart Mill had some acquaintance with Vico’s ideas, perhaps through Michelet, and referred to his theory of cycles in his System of Logic in 1843; but in the following year he confessed to Comte that he had never read Vico himself. This confession was elicited by a long letter from Comte,102 who had been reading Vico for the first time and found himself confirmed in a view he had already expressed in his Positive Philosophy in connection with Montesquieu and Condorcet, that all such constructions prior to the nineteenth century were bound to be abortive. Yet Comte had seen in some of Vico’s axioms “a first step toward the sense of the veritable evolution of society,” thought his genius superior to that of Montesquieu, planned to insert a page or two on Vico in the second edition of his major work, and did discuss him briefly in his Positive Polity. Vico’s chief positive merit, he thought, consisted in “a quite profound and often sound understanding of the historical philosophy of language.”
Vico’s name was duly entered in the Positivist Calendar, with Herder’s as its leap-year substitute; but the New Science was not included in the Positivist Library.103 Yet it was read. John Henry Bridges, for example, in an article in the Positivist Review on “Fetichism and Positivism,” wrote that
The first to call attention systematically to this [fetichistic] mode of regarding the surrounding world was the Neapolitan thinker Vico, early in the eighteenth century. With Vico, as afterwards with Comte, it formed the basis of his philosophy. Let us recall a few of Vico’s words: “Men, ignorant of the causes of things, and unable to explain them even by analogy, endowed surrounding objects with their own nature. So it is that when they see the magnet attracting iron they say the loadstone is enamoured of the metal.” “All nature,” he goes on to say, “becomes to primitive man a vast animated body capable of passion and affection.” “It is noteworthy,” he observes, “that in all languages a large number of expressions relating to inanimate things are taken from the human body, or from human feelings and passions. Head signifies summit, or beginning; forehead, shoulders, front and back; we speak of any kind of opening as a mouth; the rim of a vessel is a lip; a rake or a comb has teeth; so, too, we speak of the gorge of a river, of the flesh of fruits, of a vein of metal. Wine is the blood of the grape; in a mine we descend to the bowels of the earth; the sky or the sea smiles; the wind whistles, the waves murmur; a table groans under the weight of provisions. Innumerable examples may be gathered from all languages.”104
In the first volume of his History of Greece (1846), in the chapter on the “Grecian Mythes, as Understood, Felt and Interpreted by the Greeks Themselves,” George Grote devoted a four-page footnote to Vico, with long citations from Ferrari’s edition of his works.
The mental analogy between the early stages of human civilisation and the childhood of the individual is forcibly and frequently set forth in the works of Vico. That eminently original thinker dwells upon the poetical and religious susceptibilities as the first to develope themselves in the human mind, and as furnishing not merely connecting threads for the explanation of sensible phaenomcna, but also aliment for the hopes and fears, and means of socialising influence to men of genius, at a time when reason was yet asleep…. He remarks that in an age of fancy and feeling, the conceptions and language of poetry coincide with those of reality and common life, instead of standing apart as a separate vein….
[The New Science] places these early divine fables and theological poets … in their true point of view, and assigns to them their proper place in the ascending movement of human society: it refers the mythes to an early religious and poetical age, in which feeling and fancy composed the whole fund of the human mind, over and above the powers of sense: the great mental change which has since taken place has robbed us of the power, not merely of believing them as they were originally believed, but even of conceiving completely that which their first inventors intended to express.
The views here given from this distinguished Italian (the precursor of F. A. Wolf in regard to the Homeric poems, as well as of Niebuhr in regard to the Roman history) appear to me no less correct than profound; and the obvious inference from them is, that attempts to explain (as it is commonly called) the mythes (i. c. to translate them into some physical, moral or historical statements, suitable to our order of thought) arc, even as guesses, essentially unpromising. Nevertheless Vico, inconsistently with his own general view, bestows great labour and ingenuity in attempting to discover internal meaning symbolised under many of the mythes … which he draws out and exhibits under the form of a civil history of the divine and heroic times….105
It is evident that Grote had overlooked or failed to grasp the “master key” of the New Science, the doctrine of “poetic characters.” Perhaps because he sensed its perversity, he omitted the critical part of the footnote from later editions of his History.
Buckle’s Introduction to the History of Civilization in England (1859–61) referred to Vico several times, though it was taxed with omitting him by critics who consulted only the “List of Authors Quoted” and the index. “Before Montesquieu,” Buckle said, “the only two great thinkers who had really studied Roman history were Machiavelli and Vico; but … Vico, whose genius was perhaps even more vast than that of Montesquieu, can hardly be considered his rival; for, though his Scienza Nuova contains the most profound views on ancient history, they are rather glimpses of truth than a systematic investigation of any one period.” And again:
It is this deep conviction that changing phenomena have unchanging laws … which, in the seventeenth century, guided in a limited field Bacon, Descartes, and Newton; which in the eighteenth century was applied to every part of the material universe; and which it is the business of the nineteenth century to extend to the history of the human intellect. This last department of inquiry we owe chiefly to Germany; for, with the single exception of Vico, no one even suspected the possibility of arriving at complete generalizations respecting the progress of man, until shortly before the French Revolution, when the great German thinkers began to cultivate this, the highest and most difficult of all studies.
But he charged Vico with the failing common to metaphysicians of regarding their doctrines not as hypotheses to be verified but as theories proved by reason and needing only historical illustration.106
Alfred Henry Huth in his Life of Buckle (1880) devoted several pages to Vico as the earliest of Buckle’s forerunners:
The great skeptic Vico was the first who fairly grasped the view that we must look for the laws of history, not in divine interference, but in natural and earthly circumstances…. This view, which his position at Naples made dangerous, and his religion perhaps made him unwilling to express, he concealed under the veil of that very Providence which he denied, saying that man was so constituted by it that he must move in a constant direction. He generalizes history. He saw that the history of the Roman Empire, the only history he knew, was not a solitary and peculiar instance of growth followed by maturity and decay, but the result of general laws…. Nay, so bold were his generalizations and so skeptical his mind, that he denied that Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Solon, and Dracon had had any existence, and averred that their codes were first produced by the wants of man, and then ascribed to them, by that tendency in ignorant ages to ascribe everything great to individuals…. His method is the same as Comte’s….
In an account of the aims of his histories of European morals and of the spirit of rationalism, Lecky wrote in 1870:
Both books belong to a very small school of historical writings which began in the eighteenth century with Vico, was continued by Condorcet, Herder, Hegel, and Comte, and which found its last great representative in Mr. Buckle (from many of whose opinions I widely differ, but from whom I have learnt very much). What characterises these writers is that they try to look at history, not as a series of biographies, or accidents, or pictures, but as a great organic whole; that they consider the social and intellectual condition of the world at any given period as a problem to be explained, the net result of innumerable influences which it is the business of the historian to trace; and that they especially believe that intellectual belief has not been due merely to arguments or other intellectual causes, but has been very profoundly modified in many curious ways by social, political, and industrial influences.107
Similar views were later expressed in the histories of rationalism and free thought by Robertson and Benn; by J. B. Bury in his Idea of Progress; and by Joseph McCabe in the Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists. Bury thought it “obvious how readily [Vico’s] doctrine could be adapted to the conception of Progress as a spiral movement.” Robertson traced “Tylor’s outstanding theorem of ‘Animism’ ” to Vico and Hume, who “may have read Vico.”108 Benn remarked that Carlyle had found no place in his gallery for the hero as philosopher, and that the character of Vico “might go far to supply that void.”109
With few exceptions, the representatives of both the Broad Church and the positivist and rationalist schools drew their knowledge of Vico from secondary sources, or at best from Michelet’s translations. The first British philosopher to make a thorough first-hand study of the whole range of Vico’s writings was Robert Flint. In 1872 he published what was to have been the first volume of a history of the philosophy of history in Europe. This first volume was devoted to France and Germany, and was to have been followed by one on Italy and England, in which Flint hoped “to trace with fulness and in detail the effects of Vico’s historical speculations on Italian thought.”110 Twenty years later, instead of this second volume, which was again promised but never appeared, he made a fresh start by publishing an enlargement and revision of part of the first, that on France and French Belgium and Switzerland.111 In the meantime, however, he had written a masterly little volume on Vico for Blackwood’s series of Philosophical Classics for English Readers (1884), which remains the standard exposition in English.
The editor of the series, William Knight, read Flint’s volume to nopurpose if at all, for in his Philosophy of the Beautiful, “being outlines of the history of aesthetics,” published five years later (1889), he disposed of Vico in a single and uninforming sentence. Bosanquet in his History of Aesthetic (1892) did not so much as mention Vico, though he believed that he had passed over “no writer of the first rank.” But Saintsbury, perhaps because Croce had sent him his essay, “G. B. Vico, First Discoverer of Aesthetic Science,” borrowed Flint’s set of Ferrari’s edition of Vico’s works, and included in the third volume of his History of Criticism (1904) a fairly proportioned though unsympathetic account of Vico. Of what he conceived to be “purely literary criticism” he found “little or nothing in Vico.” “I have not yet found a place where he deals with any author in a purely literary spirit. The zeal of his New Science of Humanity has eaten him up. A poem is a historical document….”
And it would be really “unphilosophical” to leave him without pointing out, what has not, so far as I know, been pointed out before, how noteworthy he is as exemplifying the corruption of a thing accompanying quite early stages of its growth. We have throughout maintained that the Historical method is the salvation of Criticism, and in this very period we are witnessing its late application to that purpose. Vico is the very apostle, nay, more, the prophet, of the Historical method itself. Yet here, as elsewhere, the postern to Hell is hard by the gateway of the Celestial City.
In a footnote, as if to soften the acerbity of his judgment, he added: “To do Vico full justice, we must admit that his object was less to break up Homer, as they break up Caedmon and Isaiah, than to attribute the whole work to the whole early Greek people.”
A new era in Vichian studies, in England as elsewhere, was inaugurated in the first decades of the twentieth century by the bibliographical, editorial, historical and critical work of Croce, Gentile, and Nicolini. Croce’s Philosophy of Giambattista Vico was translated into English in 1913, and after the interruption of scholarly work by the First World War there was a series of illuminating essays and chapters on Vico by C. E. Vaughan, J. G. Robertson, and Thomas Whittaker, and a model of the biographer’s art by H. P. Adams. At least one English philosopher-historian, R. G. Collingwood (the translator of Croce’s book), has absorbed Vico’s thought and made it his own; and suggestive interpretations of Vico’s ideas are scattered through his writings. A few critics, such as Herbert Read,112 have begun to draw upon Vico’s ideas, and creative literature itself to show his influence.
The most striking case is James Joyce. Already steeped (like Coleridge before him) in Dante and Bruno, he read and digested Vico in Trieste about 1905, and proceeded to naturalize him in his imagination as an eponymous hero of the rocky road to Dublin—Vico Road in the suburb of Dalkey. There are traces of Vico in Ulysses, and its Odyssean parallelism may have been partly inspired by Vico’s “discovery of the true Homer.” But Vico’s cyclical theory of corso and ricorso, conveniently symbolized by the real Vico Road, is the express theme of Finnegans Wake. Freely adapting Vico’s three ages (theocratic, heroic, and human) and his three institutions (religion, marriage, and burial), and making a fourth of the recurrence to the first, Joyce divides the book into four parts. The last words of the fourth, “A way a lone a last a loved a long the,” begin a sentence which is completed by the opening paragraph of the first: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.” (Vicus is the Latin form of Vico’s name, which means a street or road with houses on either side.) Thus “The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin” (p. 452). “Teems of times and happy returns. The same anew. Ordovico or viricordo” (p. 215). Vico appears in person as “the producer (Mr. John Baptister Vickar)” (p. 255). On the opening page there is a hundred-lettered clap of Vico’s all-initiating thunder, which recurs at intervals. The time machine with which Joyce operates is “Our wholemole mill-wheeling vicociclometer” (p. 614). As Vico reduces gods and heroes to folk characters, the protean initials of Joyce’s hero, who “moves in vicous cicles yet remews the same” (p. 134), have by “a pleasant turn of the populace” given rise to the nickname “Here Comes Everybody” (p. 32). The hero’s subconscious mind, expatiating in sleep, is the historical consciousness of the race; and the pregnant language of the book is reminted from the much-handled and partially-defaced words of common speech to give vivid reality to Vico’s theory of the history embedded in language. In the school-day section of the second part, the book takes the temporary appearance of an annotated schoolbook, and one set of marginalia, in pompous capitals, is a burlesque of Vico’s terminology. “PROBAPOSSIBLE PROLEGOMENA TO IDEAREAL HISTORY.” “THE LOCALISATION OF LEGEND LEADING TO THE LEGALISATION OF LATIFUNDISM.” “PANOPTICAL PURVIEW OF POLITICAL PROCRESS AND THE FUTURE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST.” At intervals, all four parts are condensed into a series of four words or phrases: “thunderburst, ravishment, dissolution, and providentiality” (p. 362); “eggburst, eggblend, eggburial, and hatch-as-hatchcan” (p. 614); “sullemn fulminance, sollemn nuptialism, sallemn sepulture and providential divining” (p. 599).
William Butler Yeats had attended the lectures on Croce’s Aesthetic given in London by Douglas Ainslie, and in 1924 he read and annotated Croce’s Philosophy of Giambattista Vico in Collingwood’s translation. In Italy in 1925 he adopted the Fascist interpretation of Vico advanced by Gentile and other idealists. In the early 1930’s, as an introduction to his Swift play, “The Words upon the Window-Pane,” he wrote an essay drawing the parallel and contrast between Vico’s New Science and Swift’s Discourse of the Contests and Dissentions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome. “Had we [Irish] a thinking nation,” he wrote in his notebook, “the Discourse with its law of nations might be for us what Vico is to the Italians.” In the essay itself, expounding Vico’s cyclical theory, he said that the social order
was harsh and terrible until the Many prevailed, and its joints cracked and loosened, happiest when some one man, surrounded by able subordinates, dismissed the Many to their private business … Students of contemporary Italy, where Vico’s thought is current through its influence upon Croce and Gentile, think it created, or in part created, the present government of one man surrounded by just such able assistants as Vico foresaw … Pascal thought there was evidence for and against the existence of God, but that if a man kept his mind in suspense about it he could not live a rich and active life, and I suggest to the Cellars and Garrets that though history is too short to change either the idea of progress or the eternal circuit into scientific fact, the eternal circuit may best suit our preoccupation with the soul’s salvation, our individualism, our solitude. Besides we love antiquity, and that other idea—progress—the sole religious myth of modern man, is only two hundred years old.
In 1938 Yeats wrote in his On the Boiler: “Vico was the first modern philosopher to discover in his own mind, and in the European past, all human destiny. ‘We can know nothing,’ he said, ‘that we have not made.’ ” This conception, as Louis MacNeice has remarked, is prevalent in Yeats’s later poetry.
Whatever flares upon the night
Man’s own resinous heart has fed.113
THERE has been as yet no study of Vico’s reputation in America, but investigation would probably show that, though his name has been more familiar here than in England, there has been little first-hand study of him until recent years. Perhaps the earliest visitor who knew his writings was Chastellux, who was accompanied by a grandson of Montesquieu on his travels here in 1780–82. Franklin, who might have learned of Vico through Filangieri, as Goethe did, had a cast of mind too alien from Vico’s to appreciate him.
Lorenzo da Ponte, friend of Casanova and librettist to Mozart, who had kept an Italian bookstore in London with scholars like Mathias, Roscoe and Walker for patrons, spent the last thirty-three years of his life in this country, chiefly as teacher of Italian language and literature and operatic entrepreneur in New York City. In 1831 he compiled a catalogue of Italian books for sale there, and a copy of the Scienza nuova was listed with the following note: “This illustrious Neapolitan has won belated recognition as one of the most sublime philosophers of the Republic of Letters. All the London journals speak of him with enthusiasm.”114
Cousin’s Sorbonne lectures on the history of philosophy were translated here by Linberg (1832) and by O. W. Wright (1852) and both translations were widely read, especially in college courses. From the thirties through the sixties there was a series of articles on the philosophy of history in various journals, nearly all giving some account of Vico, usually based on Cousin’s lecture and on Michelet’s French paraphrase of the New Science.115 The earliest of these articles, under the title “Progress and Limits of Social Improvement,” was contributed to the North American Review by Edward Everett’s less famous brother, Alexander Hill Everett, during his editorship of that journal. It was ostensibly a review of the sixth edition of the Scienza nuova, to which, however, he refers only once, in a long footnote in which he says that “the public attention has lately been attracted” to Vico’s work by “the praise which Cousin has bestowed upon it” and by Michelet’s translation.
Our libraries are overrun with works upon the manner in which nations ought to be governed; but there are scarcely any upon the principles that in fact regulate their progress, and determine their condition, including the forms of their governments, at the different periods of their history. The work of Vico, which we have placed at the head of this article, is the only one of much importance upon this subject, and in this the author has done little more than propose the problem,—his own solution being far from complete or satisfactory. The principal merit of his book lies, in fact, in the title, which proves that Vico had distinctly conceived the original and important idea, that the circumstances which regulate the origin, progress and decline of nations are susceptible of generalization, and may be stated and classed as a separate branch of philosophy. In his attempt to do this, Vico failed, and the principles of the New Science are still to be discovered.
The sociologist George Frederick Holmes suggested to Comte in 1852 that “Vico, though somewhat of a pedant, appears to present stronger claims to your regard than Condorcet, as your legitimate precursor in historical science.” Theodore Parker, reviewing Buckle in 1858, reproached him for ignorance of Vico. But serious study of his writings began with John Fiske. In an essay on Buckle written at the age of nineteen he remarked that “the Scienza nuova of Vico contained many new and startling views of history, and the writings of Montesquieu presented a daring attempt to constitute a social science; but both these great thinkers were crippled by a lack of materials…. ” In November, 1863, while a student at the Harvard Law School, he had an interview with Charles Eliot Norton, who wanted him to be a regular reviewer and contributor to the North American Review. They talked of Vico’s place in modern thought, and Norton lent Fiske his copy of the New Science. In the course of his study of it Fiske wrote:
It is the driest, obscurest metaphysicalest book I ever got hold of. Confucius is a more lucid writer. “Mortgages” and “Remainders” arc pleasanter to peruse. And still it has many capital ideas—some of them quite Maine-y-Cornewall Lewisy—enough to keep me from throwing down the book, even while I curse at its clumsy phraseology.
The results of his study do not appear in any extended discussion of Vico in his published writings; he simply assimilated so much of Vico as he could into his own thinking. In his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy he makes the casual remark in a footnote that “the theory of Vico that social progress takes place in cycles in which history literally repeats itself, is based upon a very inadequate knowledge of the results of the cooperation of many interacting forces”; a remark which betrays a very inadequate comprehension of Vico.116
The American Social Science Association, founded just after the Civil War, was hard put to justify its continued existence as history, economics, political science and other disciplines seceded to form associations of their own. Those who sought to keep alive the ideal of an integral science of society harked back to its great forerunners, and Vico’s name was often invoked along with Comte’s. Frank B. Sanborn, one of the founders of the Association and for many years its general secretary, sketching the history of social science in 1878, found its pioneers in Vico, Adam Smith and Comte, and quoted an Italian corresponding member to the effect that “the New Science of Vico is this same new science of our own day, which considers human society as an organic whole, and studies its development and its different aspects through long periods of time.” But by 1892 Sanborn was reduced to speaking of it as “this federation of sciences—this syndicate of philosophy, economics, philanthropy, ethics, and natural science,” and his trinity was reconstituted thus:
Vico, the Italian, who invented the philosophy of history, Adam Smith, the Scotchman, who invented political economy, as we understand it, and Franklin, the American (greatest of the three), who put social science upon the plainest practical footing.117
As in the cases of H. S. Maine, G. C. Lewis, E. B. Tylor and others in England, it appears that Vico was not read by the great American continuer of his work, the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, or even by such historians as Brooks and Henry Adams, for whom the construction of a philosophy of history was a consuming passion. But of late years the sociologists have again become aware of his pioneer efforts, and an American by adoption, Pitirim Sorokin, quotes him often and (unlike Spengler and Toynbee) freely acknowledges his anticipation of the main results of his own more elaborate and methodical investigations. He sees in history a trendless fluctuation or cycle of what he calls ideational, idealistic and sensate cultures, each with its own typical forms of art, science, ethics and law, of social, political and military institutions. He regards these three cultures as roughly parallel to Vico’s three ages of gods, heroes and men.
Since the Fascist era, Italian scholars resident in this country have made helpful contributions to American understanding of their compatriot. Noteworthy among these is Elio Gianturco, to whom we owe a doctoral dissertation on Joseph de Maistre and Giambattista Vico (1937) and a series of articles and reviews, in one of which he argues that “Vico’s most outstanding achievements lie in the history of Roman law, where he is supremely great.”117a
SO FAR we have traced Vico’s reputation and influence in the various national cultures, with occasional reference to the way in which episodes in one of these have had repercussions in others. In conclusion, however, we must speak of one movement of international proportions in which his name and ideas have constantly recurred, and which may, more than others, have his future reputation in its hands. After making a careful study of Lassalle’s great work on property, the System of Acquired Rights (1861), Marx wrote to its author from London: “It surprises me that you seem not to have read Vico’s New Science—not for anything you would have found in it for your special purpose, but for its philosophic conception of the spirit of Roman law in opposition to the legal Philistines.” Because of the difficulty of Vico’s Italian style, he advised Lassalle to use the Princess Belgioioso’s French translation, from which he quoted several passages “to whet your appetite.” “Vico contains in the germ Wolf (on Homer), Niebuhr (on Roman history in the ‘regal’ period), the foundations of comparative philology (not without caprice), and a great deal else that is original. I have so far never been able to lay my hands on his more strictly juridical writings.”118 On the same day Marx wrote to Engels in lighter vein: “Vico says in his New Science that Germany is the only country in Europe where ‘an heroic language’ is still spoken. If he had ever had the pleasure of acquainting himself with the Vienna Presse or the Berlin Nationalzeitung, the old Neapolitan would have changed his mind.”119 Five years later he referred to Vico in an important footnote to Capital:
A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century was the work of a single individual. No such book has yet been published. Darwin has aroused our interest in the history of natural technology, that is in the development of the organs of plants and animals as productive instruments sustaining the life of these creatures. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, the organs which are the material basis of every kind of social organization, deserve equal attention? Since, as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between human history and natural history is that the former is made by man and the latter is not, would not the history of human technology be easier to write than the history of natural technology? By disclosing man’s dealings with nature, the productive activities by which his life is sustained, technology lays bare his social relations and the mental conceptions that flow from them.120
In 1896, after four years of work on Vico, Georges Sorel contributed to the Marxist Devenir Social121 a book-length “Étude sur Vico” using this footnote as a touchstone for determining the soundness and importance of the various elements in Vico’s thought, and finding in what he called “Vico’s ideogenetic law” an anticipation of the Marxist doctrine of ideas as functions of the modes of production. Sorel later applied certain of Vico’s ideas, especially that of cyclical recurrence, to the history of primitive Christianity122 and the theory of the general strike;123 and Croce observed in retrospect that Marx and Sorel had brought to maturity Vico’s “idea of the struggle of classes and the rejuvenation of society by a return to a primitive state of mind and a new barbarism.”124
Marx and Engels seem to have taken from Vico, perhaps in the first place through Michelet but later at first hand, the formula that “men make their own history,” from which their historical materialism was developed. Vico had conceived the whole historical process as an organic growth and dissolution and regrowth in which at any stage each aspect of culture—custom, morality, law, government, language, art, science, religion, philosophy—has a form and character different from that which it had in the preceding stage. But Marx and Engels made explicit a distinction which remained latent in Vico, between primary and secondary activities. In order to make history, men must live, and in order to live they must eat, drink, clothe and shelter themselves, and reproduce their kind. These primary activities involve a double relationship, physical and social. A certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is implemented by a certain mode of cooperation, or social stage. Because each generation is absorbed into or finds itself in possession of the productive system won by the previous generation, which serves it as the raw material for new production, a connection arises in human history, a history of humanity takes shape.
Men make their own history [says Marx], but they do not make it out of the whole cloth. They make it out of conditions not of their own choosing, but such as lie ready to hand. The traditions of all past generations weigh like an Alp on the brain of the living.125
The relations in which men stand in and to the system of production condition all their other relations. These relations, with their strains and stresses and dislocations, are reflected in our consciousness, in our thinking, in our language, in the ideological constructions of our politics, law, morality, religion, metaphysics. These secondary activities have no continuous and independent history of their own, intelligible in abstraction from the primary activities which they reflect, interpret, justify, decently cloak, and often disguise. Thus the essence of historical materialism is that economic history is the deep central channel of the stream of history which must be sounded before its surface currents, eddies, shallows and backwaters can be adequately understood.
Historical materialism in this sense went beyond anything directly asserted by Vico, but, as it seemed to his Marxist interpreters, in a direction in which he himself had gone a long way. The Italian Marxist, Antonio Labriola, a correspondent of Engels, in his Essays on the Materialist Conception of History, accordingly recognized Vico as one of its forerunners. These essays were edited by Croce in Italian and by Sorel in French, and made an indelible impression on the young Trotsky in his Odessa prison. Labriola’s lectures at Rome on the philosophy of history had taken their start from Vico, and he thought at first of calling the second essay and the volume itself From Morgan to Vico.126 Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue in his Economic Determinism: The Historical Method of Karl Marx (r907) worked out more fully a similar view of the relations between Vico, Morgan and Marxism; and elsewhere he described Marx’s personal grasp of history in terms of Vico’s theory of knowledge.127 It is no accident, therefore, that Vico enjoys high repute in present-day Russia as the progenitor of the theory of the class struggle;128 or that Trotsky quoted Vico on the first page of his History of the Russian Revolution; or that Edmund Wilson started To the Finland Station from Michelet’s discovery of Vico.