VI VICO
T
HE great crisis in the history of our understanding of history which occurred between Voltaire and Bossuet has no greater and more significant representative than the Italian, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), a man as poor and modest in his private life as he was rich and proud as the author of a New Science. l It is a system in fragments, an immense project of comparative universal history in which each part begins anew with the principles of the whole. It is, therefore, often repetitious and obscure, but it has that kind of obscurity which derives from the passionate search and re-search of a genius. The New Science appeared in its first edition in 1725 and in its complete form in 1730 and was again revised in 1744, four years before Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois, ten years before Voltaire's Essay, a hundred years before Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology and Revelation, and almost two centuries before it was rediscovered and recognized as the most original advance toward a philosophy of history. It is the fruit of a lifelong search ~nto the depth of historic humanity. It anticipates not only fundamental ideas of Herder and Hegel, Dilthey and Spengler, but also the more particular disco\'eries of Roman history by Niebuhr and Mommsen, the theory of Homer by Wolf, the interpretation of mythology by Bachofen, the reconstruction of ancient life through etymology by Grimm, the historical understanding of laws by Savigny, of the ancient city and of feudalism by Fustel de Coulanges, and of the class struggles by Marx and Sorel.2 In his own day Vieo was scarcely known. He was too far ahead of his time to have immediate influence. The intelligent verdict of a royal censor was that the New Science is a work "marking a most unfortunate crisis in European history."s Vico, a loyal
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