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

Review Article 481 Italy. R. G. Collingwood’s English translation of Croce’s book appeared in 1913; it was followed by a chapter in C. E. Vaughan’s Studies in Political Philosophy in 1921, an essay by Thomas Whittaker in 1926, a brilliant short study by Erich Auerbach in 1932 (translated from German into English only in 1959), and, finally, a full-length expository work by H. P. Adams in 1935. Vico’s star began, albeit slowly, to rise again. In 1944, the bicente­ nary year of Vico’s death, T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch published their English version of Vico’s Autobiography, furnished with a full and illuminat­ ing introduction. This was followed by their translation of the third edition of the New Science of 1744. Interest in the old Neapolitan in English- speaking countries increased dramatically. If he was neglected earlier by Anglo-American philosophers, there were several reasons for this. Few British or American philosophers read Italian: Vico’s elaborate, convoluted, “ baroque” ’ prose, archaic even in its own time, with its constant digres­ sions, occult references, esoteric allusions, and lack of any apparent order or easily intelligible structure, faced the reader with a huge and impassable jungle which discouraged even the intellectually enterprising. Moreover, the topic itself was far removed from the main currents of Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Epistemology, philosophical logic, moral and politi­ cal thought, all with a strongly empirical bias, lie at the center of modem British and American philosophical writing; theories of history, of culture, of the presuppositions of the social sciences, tended at best to be relegated to studies of inductive logic. It is a curious fact that even during the Hegelian interlude in English thought it was the logical, metaphysical, ethical, and political implications of Idealism that for the most part occupied the minds of T. H. Green and Bradley, Bosanquet and McTaggart, Royce and Joa­ chim; the vision of history which is at the heart of everything Hegel ever wrote, without which, indeed, it is scarcely possible to grasp its shape and purpose, seemed to be all but excluded from their horizons. This may seem strange, even astonishing; and was, indeed, so considered in philosophical circles in Germany and Italy and has lately, in part under the influence of Marxism, come under criticism from some native critics, who, in this respect, echo the sharp attacks delivered at an earlier period by Croce’s best-known English disciple, R. G. Collingwood. Yet lack of historical con­ sciousness (the shortcomings of which need no stressing today) has its ad­ vantages; intellectual progress does not always seem to depend on a devel­ oped sense of history—if anything, it can be an obstacle to it; individual thinkers, and entire societies, take what they need from the thought of the past without too much bother about its accurate reconstruction, and absorb, interpret, misunderstand, reject, and transform such ideas very freely, according to the needs, interests, and outlook of their own time and place and social conditions; such ideas are refracted (at times oddly) in what the Annales school of historians has called the mentalite of classes or groups, and change their form and sense in response to the demands of individual genius. But while the absence of historical self-awareness, or even system­ atic blindness to, or distortion of, the thought of the past may, at times, be indispensable to intellectual development in original directions, this is ac­ quired at a price: for it leads to the falsification of the history of ideas, to arbitrary or ignorant or anachronistic accounts of the outlooks of groups, societies, or entire civilizations. Whether more is lost on the swings of historical understanding than is made up on the roundabouts of philosophical