The New Science of Giambattista Vico

by Giambattista Vico

THE LITERARY WORK

An essay written in Italy in the 1720s to 1740s; revised and published in Italian (as Principi di Scienza Nuova di Giambattista Vico d’Intorno alla Comune Natura delle Nazioni) in 1744; in English in part in 1834, in full in 1948.

SYNOPSIS

A wide-ranging philosophical inquiry into the characteristics of history Vico’s essay follows in the wake of the scientific revolution. The essay argues that since humans make their past but do not make nature (the subject of science), history is ultimately more knowable than science.

Events in History at the Time of the Essay

The Essay in Focus

For More Information

Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744), generally called Giambattista, was born in Naples, Italy, where he lived nearly all his life. His early education was unremarkable, but later, while working as a tutor, the young Vico spent a decade poring over classical literature, philosophy, and law, as well as Italian literature. In 1699 he married an uneducated friend from childhood named Teresa Destito, with whom he would have eight children. That same year, Vico was appointed professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. Plagued always by poverty, he suffered his greatest disappointment in 1723, when he failed to secure advancement to a higher-paying job as law professor at the same university. Yet his professional frustration pushed him to begin composing the work now recognized as his masterpiece, the New Science. Vico traces this process in his Autobiografia (1725-28; Autobiography), a memoir of his intellectual development written just after the original New Science was published. Vico had earlier written De antiquissima italorum sapientia (1710; On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians) and De universi iuris uno principio etfine uno liber unus (1720; On the One Principle and One End of Universal Law). In such works, he began to develop the ideas that would find their fullest expression in the New Science. These ideas emerged out of—and partly in reaction to—the scientific and philosophical revolution that permanently reshaped European thought at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Events in History at the Time of the Essay

Galileo, Newton, and the birth of modern science

In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) opened the door to modern science by suggesting that the earth revolves around the sun. In reviving this idea (introduced much earlier by ancient Greek scientists), Copernicus opposed the earth-centered picture of the universe long proclaimed by European religious authorities. Copernicus’s theory found observational support in the pioneering work of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who in 1609 became the first to use the recently invented telescope to examine stars and planets in the night sky. Galileo also carried out the systematic investigations into the physics of falling objects that have won him recognition as the father of experimental physics.

After a century of intense activity by a number of scientists in various European countries, the scientific revolution begun by Copernicus and Galileo culminated during Vico’s lifetime in the genius of the English physicist Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In 1687, when Vico was not yet twenty, Newton published his findings in a book, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), usually called the Principia. By common consent the most influential scientific work ever published, the Principia lays out in precise mathematical detail the farreaching discoveries Newton had made over several decades. Newton’s great insight was that one of the forces that governs the movements of all physical bodies, big or small—from distant planets to falling objects on earth—is gravity. His laws of gravitation and motion explained the workings of the Copernican solar system by subjecting the orbits of the planets to mathematical analysis, and also explained Galileo’s experimental observations with falling objects.

To express his findings, Newton invented a new mathematical language, the calculus, which could describe moving bodies such as planets or falling objects. Around the same time, the calculus was independently invented by German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz (1646-1716), who used a superior system of notation. Vico’s New Science acknowledges the power of the advances made by Newton and Leibniz, referring to them as “the two foremost minds of our age” (Vico, New Science, p. 104).

Rationalism and empiricism in Enlightenment thought

In the seventeenth century, science still belonged to the larger discipline of philosophy. What we call science today went under the name “natural philosophy,” which is how Newton used the phrase in the title of his great work. Earlier natural philosophers had already drawn attention to the deep connection between that discipline and mathematics. A half-century before Newton’s work, for example, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes (1596-1650) published his Discourse on Method (1637). In this seminal work, Descartes argued that mathematics was the purest form of reason, that reason was the sole path to certain knowledge, and that such knowledge could only occur in philosophy. Accordingly, Descartes disparaged the study of history, as lacking the degree of verifiability necessary to be included among the branches of knowledge.

Taken together with the astonishing discoveries of the scientists, Descartes’ ideas ultimately helped spark a reverence for the power of reason that dominated European culture in the eighteenth century, a period that soon came to be called the Enlightenment (otherwise known as the Age of Reason). At the beginning of the Enlightenment—often said to extend from the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687 to the French Revolution in 1789—Vico was a young man in Naples. Like others he spent time conversing about intellectual and cultural matters in the city’s lively salons, where groups discussed the newest ideas. As he relates in the Autobiography, he discussed Descartes with his friends, and like most of them he began his intellectual life accepting the French philosopher’s ideas.

By the end of the first decade of the eighteenth century, however, Vico had changed his earlier opinion. While he continued to accept that mathematics offered knowable truth, he did so not because he thought that this truth was unchanging and external to humanity (as Descartes did). Instead, Vico saw mathematics as a human creation, and so as knowable by humans. Vico likewise rejected Descartes’ disparagement of history, arguing that history too is a human creation and therefore knowable to humans.

The idea that something can be fully understood only by its creator has been traced as far back as the fifth-century theologian St. Augustine. Vico seized on this concept, which in his book On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians (1710), he expressed in Latin as verum et factum redprocantur (“the true and the made are interchangeable”). Around this central idea, often called the verum, factum principle, Vico would spend the rest of his life carefully assembling his case in history’s defense. That long effort resulted in the New Science, which can be seen, essentially, as Vice’s impassioned answer to Descartes.

However, Vico was not the first to reject Cartesian rationalism, as Descartes’ approach is called. Even before Descartes’ works appeared, other philosophers had laid the foundations of an opposing position. In claiming reason as the sole path to knowledge, Descartes had insisted that all real knowledge can be attained by reason alone, without the aid of experience. A contrary argument, that true knowledge about the world springs primarily from actual experience of it, had already been articulated by the English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Called empiricism (from the Greek word for “experience”), this tradition admitted an important role for reason but also stressed the value of observation and experiments in establishing scientific truths.

Bacon insisted that scientists must observe details before using reason to form general theories, a method he called induction (in contrast to deduction, making conclusions about details based on general theories). Isaac Newton subscribed to Bacon’s ideas, as did his friend, the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704), who elaborated his own influential interpretation of empiricism in his widely read An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Supported by such weighty figures, Bacon’s approach also influenced other Enlightenment thinkers and acted to counterbalance Descartes’ extreme rationalism. While rejecting Locke’s version of empiricism, Vico exalted Bacon as one of his venerated “four authors.” In the New Science he calls Bacon’s inductive technique “the best ascertained method of philosophizing” (New Science, p. 67).

Changing views of history

Vico was not the first to defend the study of history against the hostile claims of rationalist thinkers such as Descartes. Indeed, one such defender was none other than Gottfried von Leibniz, himself an eminent rationalist, who worked in his later years as historian of the princely German house of Hanover. Leibniz’s rationalistic approach to the study of history reflected a widespread attempt, starting in the seventeenth century, to legitimize it by making it more “scientific.” This desire led to significant improvements in historical method, as historians, like scientists, grew convinced that their discipline should be governed by rational rules and principles designed to foster a critical spirit. For example, the French ecclesiastical historian Sebastien de Tillemont (1637-98) strove openly for a new objectivity, critically weighing the major sources from each period in his magisterial accounts of early Christianity and the Roman Empire.

Naples And Epicureanism

During Vice’s lifetime, the Kingdom of Naples was ruled first by the Spanish branch of the House of Habsburg (to 1707), then by the Austrian branch (to 1734), and then by an offshoot of the Spanish branch under Charles, son of Philip V of Bourbon. A 1738 peace treaty recognized Charles, who had driven out the Austrians, as king of a sovereign Naples. Pleased to be independent again, the kingdom enjoyed a vibrant, cultural atmosphere, invigorated by an unusual number of libraries, academies, and learned salons, or discussion centers. Some 40 bookstores graced the short Via di Biagio dei Libri, including a small store owned by Vtco’s father, a poor book-seller, Vico was born in the store’s single room, where the family’s also lived.

Since ancient times, Naples had been known as a center of Epicureanism, an ancient Greek philosophy whose adherents upheld (among other ideas) the atomistic theory of matter, which held that the universe is made up of simple unchanging particles too small to be seen, Another common view of the Epicureans was that primitive humans lived in fear of nature and of the gods. In the seventeenth century, several leading Epicurean philosophers founded the well-known Academy of the Investigators in Naples, modeling it on such recently established scientific institutions as Britain’s Royal Society and France’s Academy of the Sciences, Espoused by other influential thinkers, like French scientist Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Epicureanism played a major role in shaping European intellectual attitudes of the eighteenth century, including Vico’s.

This critical, rationalist spirit has continued to shape the writing of history up to the present day. In Vico’s own day, it was represented most notably by the French author Voltaire (1694-1778; Frangois Marie-Arouet), often called the Enlightenment’s leading spirit. After making his reputation as a poet, Voltaire turned to history with his book A History of Charles XII (1731), showing how the Swedish king’s militaristic arrogance had led to tragedy and ruin for his country. In the decades after Vico’s death, the rationalistic tradition would be carried on by the greatest of Enlightenment historians, the English scholar Edward Gibbon (1737-94), who relied extensively on de Tillemont in researching his own masterpiece, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88).

Skepticism, Secularism, And Vico’s Providence

Having used reason to overturn the Church’s view of the universe, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment ushered in a new age of skeptical, secular values among European thinkers. Descartes’ attack on history was reinforced during Vico’s lifetime by the works of such philosophers as Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), whose radical skepticism towards historical sources cast further doubt on the very possibility of historical knowledge. Like many Enlightenment thinkers, Bayle was also a religious skeptic. In writings like his Critical and Historical Dictionary (1697), Bayle satirically attacked Christian dogma and popular superstition along with unfounded historical beliefs. Vico mentions Bayle twice in the New Science, both times to denounce Bayle for suggesting that human societies can exist without religion. A devout Catholic in a strongly Catholic society, Vico rejected the secular outlook, giving a central place to divine providence in the unfolding of history that he schematizes in the New Science.

These Enlightenment historians and many others who followed have shared a number of assumptions and values:

• They have tended to see human nature as unchanging and constant, assuming that people in one age and culture share the same basic values and attitudes of people in another.
• They have generally accepted the existence of certain absolute, timeless truths in areas like morality, politics, and culture, assuming that reason is the best way of recognizing those truths.
• They often write history in such a way as to illustrate those truths, as a moralizing lesson in the proper conduct of human affairs.
• Accordingly, historians of this dominant tradition have frequently projected their own cultural attitudes onto the past. The historians have promoted values common to Enlightenment thought—secularism, tolerance, freedom, and learning—and placed them in opposition to religion, intolerance, fanaticism, and obscurantism.

In the New Science Vico rejects the assumptions behind this approach to history. Just as importantly, he also rejects the historians’ projection of their own rationalistic values onto the past (though not necessarily rejecting the values themselves). Far from merely trying to turn history into a science that reflects the rationalistic assumptions and values on which science is based, Vico aims instead to create an entirely new kind of discipline to stand alongside science. While incorporating some useful elements of the scientific method, Vico’s “new science” will uphold assumptions and values all its own, ones based on imagination as much as reason.

The Essay in Focus

Contents summary

The five books of the New Science are titled as follows: “Book One: Establishment of Principles,” “Book Two: Poetic Wisdom,” “Book Three: Discovery of the True Homer,” “Book Four: The Course the Nations Run,” and “Book Five: The Recourse of Human Institutions Which the Nations Take When They Rise Again.” An engraved allegorical frontispiece depicts Vico’s main concepts in graphic form.

An introduction, “The Idea of the Work,” explains the frontispiece in detail, then gives a summary of the book’s thesis. By “studying the common nature of nations in the light of divine providence,” Vico will uncover “the origins of divine and human institutions” and lay out a system to explain “the natural law” of human society (New Science, p. 20). According to Vico’s system, after an initial stage of bestial savagery, civilizations pass through “three periods” of development:

• An “age of gods,” in which people are dominated by religion and the fear of the supernatural
• An “age of heroes,” in which societies divide themselves into “patricians” (ruling aristocrats) and “plebs” (lower-class subjects)
• An “age of men,” in which emerging political equality helps give rise to “popular common-wealths” and “monarchies”

(New Science, p. 20)

The rest of the essay is devoted to filling out the background and details of this basic picture.

Book One introduces the assumptions and methods that will shape the ideas presented later. Vico begins with a complex “Chronological Table” of history, outlining “the world of the ancient nations” (as Vico sees it) with a separate column for each: Hebrews, Chaldeans, Scythians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans (New Science, p. 29). Vico discusses each in turn. In the next section, Vico offers 114 “axioms,” brief propositions whose truth he will assume as a given in his later arguments. (Here Vico is inspired by mathematics, which proceeds on the assumption of axiomatic propositions.)

Vico divides his axioms into two categories, general and particular. The general axioms (the first 22 axioms) comprise broad principles to be followed in the study of history. They define characteristics of humanity that Vico believes persist across time, and that many or most cultures have in common. Often cryptic and vague (like much of Vice’s writing), they nevertheless contain many of his key ideas.

• Number 2: “Whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is fandliar and at hand” (New Science, p. 60). Vico explains, for example, that historians in advanced cultures can mistakenly attribute to less advanced cultures the institutions and attributes of their own culture.
• Number 3 (“the conceit of nations”): “Every nation … has had the same conceit that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world” (New Science, p. 61). Every culture tends to glorify its own achievements and to hold its origins as uniquely ancient.
• Number 4 (“the conceit of scholars”): “To this conceit of nations is added that of scholars, who will have it that what they know is as old as the world” (New Science, p. 61). Knowledge of the past is not an ever-dwindling body of traditions that either get passed on in an unbroken chain or lost forever, but something that can be discovered and increased through scholarly work.
• Number 10: “Philosophy contemplates reason, whence comes knowledge of the true; philology observes that of which human choice is the author, whence comes consciousness of the certain” (New Science, p. 63). Certainty for Vico refers to a psychological state rather than to external reality. It comes from “authority,” such as divine revelation or human testimony, which results in consciousness (conscienzd) of certainty. By contrast, knowledge (or scienza) of truth, comes from reason (as applied to experience, Vico might have said, in agreement with Francis Bacon). By marrying philosophy with philology, Vico hopes to join scienza of the true with conscienza of the certain.

Renaissance Humanism And Milology

Renaissance humanism was born in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with the rediscovery of lost ancient Greek and Latin literature. From humanism came the formidable tradition of textual and linguistic criticism known as philology. Starling with Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), philologists mastered the intricacies of classical Latin and Greek, along with other disciplines such as archeology and numismatics (the study of coins or currency), in order to form a more accurate picture of the past. Valla famously demonstrated the worth of such techniques by proving that the Donation of Constantine, long believed to have been a fourth-century document conferring temporal authority on the pope, was in fact a forgery from the eighth century. In his Autobiography, Vico mentions Valla as a major inspiration for Vico’s own philological studies. And in the New Science, Vico, a teacher of rhetoric working firmly in the humanist tradition, clearly states his intention to marry philology (including history) to philosophy (including science)

• Number 13: “Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth” (New Science, p. 63). In explaining this axiom, Vico refers to “the natural laws of the gentes [peoples],” another important idea that comes up frequently in the New Science. This “natural law” amounts to the moral impulse common to humanity, as contrasted with the often sharply differing manmade laws (“laws of nations”) found in various cultures. Historians had tried to trace ideas like “natural law” to one original parent culture from which they then spread to other cultures, but Vico argues that such ideas often originate separately among cultures that have no connection with one another.
• Number 22: “There must in the nature of human institutions be a mental language common to all nations …” (New Science, p. 67). To illustrate this “mental language,” Vico states that many proverbs with identical messages exist in different forms in different languages.

Most of the remaining axioms are specific to particular cultures and types of cultures, though with characteristic inconsistency Vico includes some broader axioms (such as Number 36) with this latter group.

• Number 24: “The Hebrew nation was founded by the true God on the prohibition of the divination on which all the gentile nations arose” (New Science, p. 68).
• Number 36: “Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak” (New Science, p. 71).
• Number 88: “The aristocratic commonwealths keep the wealth within the order of the nobility, for wealth adds to the power of this order” (New Science, p. 83).

Two brief sections round off Book One. In the first, titled “Principles,” Vico articulates the essay’s central idea, the verum/factum principle:

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping 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 civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.

(New Science, p. 96)

These principles can further be found, he states, by seeing “what institutions all men agree and always have agreed” upon (New Science, p. 97). There are three such institutions, he says: religion, marriage, and solemn burial of the dead. These three institutions are thus Vice’s “first three principles,” and he identifies them as having originally lifted humanity from its “bestial” state (New Science, p. 97). In other words, for Vico the institutions of religion, marriage, and burial comprise a minimal definition of what it means to be human.

In the final section of Book One, titled “Method,” Vico stresses the need for a monumental effort of imagination in recovering the past, which he says seems almost as remote from our understanding as the future. In each of the three sorts of ages, as well as in various cultures, people have thought and acted in ways that have differed sharply. Therefore, we cannot assume that people in the past acted or thought as we do. Only by applying our imaginations will we be able properly to use the best methods we have of entering the thinking of another age or culture. Those methods combine a variety of sources: “philosophic proofs” like legal history and theology, along with “philological proofs” like mythology, heroic verse, and etymology (New Science, p. 105).

Book Two (“Poetic Wisdom”) comprises a long, difficult, and extremely detailed account of the first, religious stage of development that Vico believes all nations pass through after emerging from a primitive state. He calls it “poetic” because “the wisdom of the ancients was that of the theological poets, who without doubt were the first sages of the gentile world” (New Science, p. 112). Hence, the overall goal of Book Two is to “show clearly and distinctly how the founders of gentile humanity imagined the gods” (New Science, p. 112). (Vico holds Jewish history apart from the rest of humanity, as having been founded by direct divine intervention.) Vico traces the origins of primitive religions to “poetic metaphysics,” arguing that these early religions were first sparked by the irrational fears that dominated early humanity’s outlook (New Science, p. 116). Making frequent reference to Roman, Greek, and European history, Vico then goes on to describe at length the “poetic” languages, morals, economies, politics, physics, cosmography, astronomy, chronology, and finally geography that arose afterward.

Book Three (“Discovery of the True Homer”) amounts to a sustained historical analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two epic poems conventionally ascribed to the ancient Greek poet Homer (c. 750b.c.e.). Vico argues that, rather than being the creation of a single author, these heroic poems were in fact the accumulated results of generations of Greek poets working within a single tradition. As one leading Vico scholar suggests, Vico appears to include this discussion “primarily as a demonstration of the proper use of a body of historical evidence” in interpreting history (Pompa, Vico: A Study of the “New Science” pp. 5-6).

Only in Book Four (“The Course the Nations Run”) does Vico turn to the task of elaborating the “three periods” of human social development (age of gods, age of heroes, age of men) that he sketched in the introduction. Each of these periods is accompanied by its own distinctive outlook, and most of Book Four is devoted to breaking those outlooks down into specific areas. Accordingly, section headings cover “Three Kinds of Natures,” “Three Kinds of Customs,” and so on, including Natural Law, Governments, Languages, Characters (written symbols or letters), Jurisprudence (civil law), Authority, Reason, Judgments (criminal law), and Sects of Times (the general temper of the times). All of these triads, however, are “embraced by one general unity. This is the unity of the religion of a provident divinity, which is the unity of spirit that informs and gives life to this world of nations” (New Science, p. 335).

Among these triads are the three kinds of language that go with the three periods. For example, in the first period, the age of the gods, people used mute signs, which Vico calls a “divine mental language,” since humanity “did not yet possess articulate speech” (New Science, p. 340). During the age of heroes, speech was poetic and militaristic. Articulate popular speech did not develop until the third age, the age of men. Governments, too, have evolved along similar lines, from theocracies (rule by priests), to aristocracies, to “human governments,” which include both monarchies and popular commonwealths, and in which “all are accounted equal under the laws” (New Science, p. 339).

Book Five (“The Recourse of Human Institutions Which the Nations Take When They Rise Again”) is relatively brief, but elaborates an important dimension of the schematic vision Vico has laid out so far. This is the concept of “recourse” (ricorso in Italian), by which the cycle of evolution is repeated over time. For example, after the ancient world went through its three stages, a new barbarism descended on Europe during the “Dark Age.” Out of this evolved a new Christian religious age, a new feudal heroic age, and finally (beginning with the Renaissance) the modern human age of European civilization. Eventually this age too will decline, Vico suggests, and the cycle will start all over again. Finally, the conclusion restates the main points of the essay, closing with the assertion “that this Science carries inseparably with it the study of piety, and that he who is not pious is not truly wise” (New Science, p. 426).

Vico’s use of etymology

In keeping with his emphasis on the importance of language, throughout the New Science (as in his earlier works) Vico uses etymology, or the study of word origins, to make historical points. Take, for example, the axiom, “The order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.”

This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.

(New Science, p. 78)

Vico goes on to give the Latin word for “law,” lex. Like nearly all words in Latin, Vico asserts, its origins have to do with forests or countryside: originally, it must have meant a collection of acorns, since the Latin for “oak” is ilex, a similar word. From there lex came to mean “a collection of vegetables,” hence the word legumina, a type of vegetable. “Finally, collecting letters, and making, as it were, a sheaf of them for each word, was called legere, reading” (New Science, p. 78).

These connections are mostly wrong. In fact, despite his wide knowledge of Greek and Latin, most (though not all) of the word origins Vico proposes are incorrect. Lex, for example, has nothing to do with either ilex or legumina, although it is perhaps related to legere (modern authorities disagree on that point). Yet Vico correctly identifies the root of legere (to read) as meaning “to collect.” Moreover, modern linguists see this same root in another word that originally meant “a thing that is collected,” lignum, which is the Latin word for “wood” (as in “firewood”). So Vico appears to have been on the right track, even if he got most of the details wrong.

The practice of etymology goes back to the ancient Greeks (who were also usually wrong about word origins), and was popular among classically trained scholars of Vico’s day. However, not until the nineteenth century did linguistic studies advance sufficiently for scholars to accurately make the sorts of connections between words that Vico attempts.

Yet, whether correct or incorrect, Vico’s etymologies serve to underscore many of his key ideas, revealing in the process much about the steps he takes to arrive at those ideas. Other etymologies Vico proposes include familia (family) as being from famuli (servants)—this is correct; Greek polemos (war) as being from Greek polis (city)—this is incorrect; and mutus (mute) as being related to the Greek mythos (myth)—this is incorrect. In most cases Vico uses etymology to illustrate the basic idea he espouses in the axioms quoted above: that word histories reflect cultural evolution, and generally proceed from the concrete and commonplace to the abstract. Again, although Vico gets the details mostly wrong, modern scholars would agree with that idea. In this, Vico’s etymological speculations resemble his work as a whole, which modern scholars have found to be remarkably insightful in its overall thrust, if often mistaken in detail.

Sources and literary context

The full title of Vico’s work unmistakably echoes three great works of the scientific revolution: Bacon’s New Organon (1620), Galileo’s Dialogues Concerning the Two New Sciences (1638), and Newton’s Principia (1687). Such scientific models aside, Vico used an extraordinarily wide variety of sources in composing the New .Science, including ancient Greek and Roman authorities, Renaissance humanists, and Enlightenment thinkers. Many of these sources are clear, often because Vico mentions them by name either in the New Science itself or in his Autobiography. Others are less clear, and tracing them has occupied generations of scholars.

Vico’s many Greek and Roman sources include the Greek epic poet Homer, the fourth century b.c.e. Greek philosopher Plato (the first of Vico’ “four authors”), the weighty philosophical traditions known as Stoicism and Epicureanism, and the Latin writers Varro (116-27 b.c.e.), Lucretius (c. 94-55 b.c.e.), and Tacitus (c. 56120c.e., the second of Vico’s “four authors”). From Varro, to whom Vico frequently refers, came the idea that history could be divided into three ages, those of the gods, of heroes, and of men, which by Vico’s time was a literary commonplace. (Vico follows Varro in tracing this idea back to the ancient Egyptians.) From Lucretius, whose poem On the Nature of Things put Epicurean philosophy into darkly powerful epic verse, came a view of early humanity as bestial, savage, and dominated by fear of nature and of the gods. Lucretius was thought to have lived and taught in Naples. His poem, recently translated into Italian, was widely read and discussed by young intellectuals in the 1680s and 1690s, when Vico was a young man.

Closer to Vico’s own time were the humanists, historians, philosophers, scientists, and legal scholars whose ideas he incorporated into his theories or reacted against. The last of Vico’s “four authors,” the Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), had shown Vico how philosophy and philology could be united. Yet Vico ultimately rejected the belief of Grotius and others that nations were bound by “natural law,” which was conceived as a rational, eternal, and overriding human nature. These natural-law theorists portrayed primitive peoples as entering into the sorts of sophisticated civil contracts discussed by recent European philosophers, an idea that Vico ridiculed. On the other hand, he developed a picture of primitive society that owed much to one of the natural-law theorists, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). In Leviathan (1651) and other writings Hobbes had portrayed such peoples as plagued by violence, savagery, and despair. Hobbes’s fearful, irrational primitives, however, were afraid of each other, whereas Vico’s—like those of Lucretius—were afraid of nature and of the gods (whom they saw in the awesome forces of nature).

Determining the origin of Vico’s central idea, the verum/factum principle, has proved especially intriguing for Vico scholars. St. Augustine and later medieval writers had suggested that making something can help one understand it better and that God has a privileged understanding of nature because He created it. This is different, however, from saying that only if one makes (or does) something can one truly understand it. The modern Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), a major proponent of Vico’s ideas in the twentieth century, traced that thought to the Spanish writer Francisco Sanchez (1523-1601), whom Vico is known to have read but who stated it quite casually. Other sources of inspiration have been suggested (including Thomas Hobbes), but it seems clear that Vico’s emphasis on the importance of the verum/factum principle (if not the principle itself) was original to him.

Viccxs Four Authors

In both the Autobiography and the New Science, Vico repeatedly mentions the “four authors whom he admired above all others”;

• Plato (fifth-fourth century b.c.e), the Greek philosopher who Vico says contemplates man as he should foe
• Tacitus (56120 C.E) the Roman historian who Vico says “contemplates man as he is”
• Francis Bacom (1561-1626), the English philosopher who Vico says “did justice to alt the sciences”
• Hugo Grotius (0583-1645), the Dutch legal scholar who founded modern international law, and who Vico says “embraces in a system of universal law the whole of philosophy and philology” (Vico, Autobiography pp, 138-39; 155)

Publication and impact

The first edition of the New Science was published in 1725, the second in 1730, and the third in 1744, just after Vico’s death on the night of January 22 of that year. The second edition reflected significant alterations and expansion on the first, and Vico declared himself finally satisfied with the third New Science. While Vico’s reputation was substantial both during and after his lifetime in Italy, outside of his own country, the New Science and its author were largely ignored until the nineteenth century. Within Italy itself, the New Science joined an already existing controversy over the idea that early humanity was primitive and wild, which countered Catholic doctrine. Supporting Vico’s portrayal were the ferini (or “wilders”) and against it were the antiferini (“antiwilders”). The controversy came to a head after Vico’s death, between 1760 and 1780.

Vico’s attempt to elevate imagination to a central role in the study of history kept him out of the mainstream of the rationalist thinking that prevailed in the years after his death. With the rise of the antirationalist Romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth century, the New Science was praised in passing by a few European thinkers, most notably the German Romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Given the book as if it were “a sacred treasure” when he visited Naples in 1787, Goethe found that it held prophecies “of the good and just that would or should hereafter be realized, based on serious contemplation of life and tradition” (Goethe in Vico, Autobiography, p. 68). Another German, the historian Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), already knew of Vico when he visited Naples two years later. It remains unclear whether Herder actually read the New Science before forming his own very similar ideas, but his works (e.g., Ideas Toward the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784-87) would be decisive in the growing call for historians to use their imaginative powers in trying to grasp other civilizations.

Indeed, it is to Vico that scholars now trace the idea that distinct civilizations and cultures have existed in history, each with its own set of values and attitudes. To Vico as well goes credit for first recognizing the need for imagination in attempting to enter what has been called the “thought world” of another culture. That Vico has been given credit for these ideas is due largely to the efforts of the influential nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), whose French translation of the New Science (1827) and enthusiastic support of its ideas brought Vico into the European intellectual mainstream for the first time. Since then, the New Science has influenced widely diverse writers and thinkers, from German political theorist Karl Marx (1818-83), the founder of communism, to Irish writer James Joyce (1882-1941), whose masterpiece Finnegans Wake (1939) begins with a reference to Vico’s idea of historical recourse. In addition to revolutionizing the study of history, Vico has also been seen as a precursor of modern fields such as anthropology, sociology, and ethnology.

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Berlin, Isaiah. Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas. New York: Viking, 1980.

Burke, Peter. Vico. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946.

Manuel, Frank E. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

Pompa, Leon. Vico: A Study of the “New Science.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

———, ed. Vico: Selected Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Stone, Harold Samuel. Vico’s Cultural History: The Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples, 1685-1750. New York: E. J. Brill, 1997.

Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, and Hayden V. White, eds. Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969.

Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, and Donald Phillip Verene, eds. Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Vico, Giambattista. The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Max Harold Fisch and Thomas Goddard Bergin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1944.

———, The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1948.