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

482 Review Article or sociological progress is an idle question: no such calculation can be >made. But let me add this: the first man to raise this issue—to ask himself about the role of changing concepts and categories, indeed, about the very possibility of an 'examination of this process'’ from an Archimedean standpoint outside the historical march of ideologies, and (as part of this question) about the very possibility of accounting for the relations of changing types of symbolic forms to the reality they are used to communi­ cate, and indeed, shape—and to raise the issue a century' before"HejgeTs Phenomenology and all the varieties of nineteenth-century historicism—and therefore the man who can justly be called the pioneer of the sociology and ■psychology of knowledge and imaginative expression (which dominates so much aesthetic and, in particular, literary criticism today) is the thinker of genius to whom this volume is dedicated.1 Often dark, confused, naive, overambitious, unscholarly even by the standards of his time, his mind clogged with ill-sorted antiquarian bric-a-brac, Vico opened a door which Ibefore him had scarcely been known to exist; for those who entered by it jthe landmarks of world history, of society, perhaps of art and literature too, jwere altered even in English-speaking countries. It was this type of enquiry that culminated in the celebrated “ crisis of historicism,” most acutely felt in German-speaking countries in the last years of the nineteenth century. The impact of relativism and historical determinism, the celebrated controversies of Marxists and neo-Kantians, historicists and positivists, the doctrinal writings of Dilthey and Max Weber, Windelband, Rickert and Troeltsch, Plekhanov, Max Adler, Labriola, and Croce, were little noticed by academic philosophers in England or America. Collingwood alone paid serious attention to some of these think­ ers: his efforts to stimulate interest in the issues that had had, and were having, a decisive influence not only on European thought but on revolution­ ary politics, met with scarcely any response among his compatriots. His translation of Croce’s study of Vico remained, by and large, unnoticed. Well might it be said, if one scans the pages of Mind, in the words which Vico addressed to his contemporaries, "[one] cannot but marvel that philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations . . . which, since men had made it, men could come to know.” 1 2 Yet it was so. Anglo-American philosophy has not developed a historical consciousness. It may have gained more by this than it has lost; but whether this is so or not, this is one of the factors responsible for the gulf, never wider than at present, which divides it from contemporary philosophy in German and Latin countries. It is this anti-historical tendency that served to put Vico’s most striking ideas beyond its ken. The translation of the Scienza Nuova by Bergin and Fisch, published in 1948, and the excellent commentaries with which it was provided by Max Fisch, did something to alter this. After this date, Anglo-American interest in i Vico rose notably. The full bibliographies with which both the recent t English symposia on Vico are furnished—-that edited by Giorgio Tagliacozzo 1Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Donald Philip Verene, eds., Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp.ix +495/'^ “2T. G. Bergin and M. H/Tisch, eds. and trans., The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 3d ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 96, 331.