Sir Isaiah Berlin, Corsi e Ricorsi. All Souls College, Oxford University

Review Article 489 the political, radical Vico of Badaloni, Giarrizzo, and Pons seems to me as unreal as the passive, detached, apolitical contemplative of Hannah Arendt (which Alain Pons rightly rejects out of hand). To have seen something that no one else had seen, a new vision of human development, of the nature of men and societies, to ask for the first time, and give an answer to, the question of what it is to understand entire cultures in all their manifestations, their rise and fall and supersession— indeed, the contribution of the novel concept of each individual culture as giving-only one among others—this is indeed to have taken a revolutionary step. This volume, like its predecessors Omaggio a Vico and the Interna­ tional Symposium of 19$8, wherever it may lead us, bears witness to the continuing vitality of a world of thought of which Vico was the pioneer; indeed, if his successors had realized it, the true and only begetter.