- Length
- 512 pagesBergin and Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, Cornell, rev. ed. 1968 - the 1744 text
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The New Science
A book written in obscurity by a badly paid professor of rhetoric in Naples, arguing that the human world can be understood in a way nature cannot, because we made it. Nobody read it for a hundred years, and then almost everyone thinking about history had to.
- Date
- 1725
- Author
- Giambattista Vico
- Region
- Naples
- Language
- Italian
- 1948 English, Bergin and Fisch The 1744 text; revised 1968 and still standard, in copyright Attested
- 1999 English, David Marsh Penguin; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Genealogical — History of a concept used as a critique of it
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
- Years back to what it answers
- 84 years
Almost unread outside Naples for a century, rediscovered by nineteenth-century historians, and now a standing reference point in the philosophy of history and the human sciences.
What the book says
An attempt to found a science of human history on a single principle: we can know what we have made. Nature was made by God and so is fully intelligible only to God; the world of nations was made by human beings, and so can be known from the inside, by reconstructing what the people who built it were thinking. Vico then reconstructs it. Human societies pass through three ages - of gods, of heroes, of men - each with its own kind of nature, custom, law, government and, crucially, language. In the first, people terrified by thunder imagine the sky as an angry giant, and speak in mute signs and things; they are not being poetic in our sense but thinking in the only way available, by making the world in their own image. In the age of heroes, aristocracies rule and speech is emblematic. In the age of men, reason and prose arrive, along with equality before the law - and with them a refinement that dissolves the bonds holding a society together, so that it collapses and the cycle begins again. Homer, on this account, is not an author but a name for a people at a particular stage, and myth is not decoration but the record of how they thought.
What it argues
That knowing and making are connected, and that this reverses the usual hierarchy of the sciences. We cannot know nature from the inside because we did not make it; we can know institutions, laws, languages and myths from the inside because human beings made them, and the evidence of how they were made survives in the words. Vico's method is therefore philological: etymologies, legal formulas and myths are treated as fossils of past states of mind. From this comes the most original claim in the book - that early people were not failed rationalists but thought in a different mode entirely, by imaginative universals rather than abstract concepts, and that a myth is what a thought looked like at that stage rather than a story told about one.
What it answered
Descartes and the natural-law theorists together. Against Descartes, that the model of certainty he offers makes the study of human things impossible. Against Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf, that their state of nature is a projection of eighteenth-century reasoning people onto ancestors who were nothing like them - what Vico calls the conceit of scholars, the assumption that whatever we know now must always have been known. His whole method is designed to prevent that.
How it argues
By etymology, myth and legal history, in prose that is difficult in a way translation does not fix. Vico's evidence is words: what a Latin legal term originally meant, why a myth takes the form it does, what a custom preserves of the conditions that produced it. The argument proceeds by a great many such readings accumulating into a pattern rather than by demonstration, and many of the individual etymologies are simply wrong. What survives is the method - read the artefact as evidence of the mind that made it - and it survives because it was right about something even where the particulars fail.
The moment
Naples under Spanish and then Austrian rule, with Vico holding a poorly paid chair of rhetoric he had failed to trade up from, supporting a family by tutoring, and publishing at his own expense - he sold a ring to pay for the first edition. He was passed over for the professorship he wanted in 1723 and wrote the New Science immediately afterwards. It was ignored, and the successive rewritings are the work of a man trying repeatedly to be understood.
How it travelled
By rescue. The book sank without trace outside a small Neapolitan circle. Michelet discovered it in the 1820s, translated and adapted it, and made Vico a founder of the French historical school; from there he entered German scholarship. Coleridge admired him, Marx cited him in a footnote to Capital on exactly the made-and-known principle, and Joyce built Finnegans Wake on the cycle of three ages and the return. Isaiah Berlin's essays in the twentieth century made him a central figure in the history of ideas.
The strongest objection
That the cycle is imposed rather than found, and the etymologies that support it will not bear weight. Vico's three ages fit the Roman material he knew best and are made to fit everything else by force; the linguistic evidence is frequently fanciful by any modern standard, and a method that rests on reading the history of a people out of the history of its words is only as good as the philology. The deeper difficulty is that the verum factum principle proves less than it promises: we made institutions collectively, over generations, without intending most of what resulted, so the sense in which we can know them from the inside is much weaker than the sense in which a geometer knows a triangle.
Why read it
In extracts and with a guide - it is long, disordered and hard, and few read it entire. The section on poetic wisdom is the heart, and the discussion of Homer is the most striking single argument. Read Berlin's essay first if you want to know why it matters before you find out how difficult it is.
- First printed
- 1725
- First in English
- 1948
- Digitised
- Partial
Three substantially different versions exist and the 1744 text is the one normally translated. Vico also published an autobiography, written to order for a journal, which is one of the earliest intellectual autobiographies of its kind.
Bergin and Fisch's English of 1948, revised 1968, is the standard and is in copyright; Marsh's Penguin version is more recent and also in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived and genuinely used. Vico is a standing reference in the philosophy of history, in hermeneutics, in the argument about whether the human sciences require a different method from the natural ones, and in work on metaphor and early thought. The specific historical claims are of interest only to specialists.
On quoting this book
The Italian is public domain but every English translation is modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Which version is authoritative, since the three differ substantially and the 1744 text is the one everyone quotes. Whether Vico is a precursor of historicism and of the human sciences, as the nineteenth century made him, or a thinker much more embedded in Renaissance and Neapolitan legal scholarship than that portrait allows, is actively argued. The extent of his influence on Marx and on Herder is often asserted and hard to document. And whether the cyclical scheme is meant literally as a law of history or as an ideal pattern is unresolved in the text itself.