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

488 Review Article from them in the type of facts which he selects as significant: man’s history for Vico is indeed a succession, but a succession of collective outlooks and conduct, of patterns of communal activity and response, which convey and embody images of the world and motives and goals—the story of the perpetual striving by men to maintain or transform relationships among themselves and with circumambient nature—and endless process enshrined in symbols—written and spoken, articulated in institutional life and every form of expressive behavior—which can be decoded by posterity. Hence his emphasis on what the ordinary historians of his (and our) day tend to leave out—means of collective self-expression—ritual, art, language, gestures, myth, social custom, law, above all, the entire affective life of men—the mentalite of social groups, which for him, far more even than for Voltaire (who did not, as a historian, practice what he preached), form the substance of man's experience on earth, in contrast with the “ external” history of battles, treaties, great men, and political records, even if it is reduced to Lenin’s celebrated formula “ who whom.” The gifts needed for the under­ standing of the symbols and institutions through which men at various levels of consciousness express what they think and feel and do, without inquiring about the truth or falsity of these beliefs, seem more akin to those of the novelist or poet than to those of an accountant or statistician, or even of the kind of biographer that Plutarch or Machiavelli, or, indeed, Vico himself, when executing commissions for important patrons, turned out to be. Vico is, above all, the pioneer of the tradition of cultural history, of the Geis- tesgeschichte of which Herder and Boeckh, Burckhardt and Fustel de Coulanges, Huizinga and Gilbert Murray are exemplars, of those who like Odysseus seek to resurrect the dead by offering them the blood of the living, an uncertain and sometimes desperate endeavor of which Wilamowitz spoke in his characteristically brilliant, moving, and skeptical inaugural lecture. It is this that most of those who have written perceptively on Vico have found in him. The contributions of, for example, Peter Hughes and Ernesto Grassi seem to me typical and imaginative examples of this approach. This view is precisely what Alain Pons, in his original, learned, excellently written, and searclMr?say, is concerned to deny. For him, Vico is, above all, concerned with practice (and in this connection he quotes the newly trans­ lated Pratica, as well as the recommendations in De Nostri )—that is, Vico’s main purpose, in his view, is not (unlike that of Galileo or Hobbes) to explain or to achieve the reasonable attitude of a prudent man (Aristotle’s goal, since infallible knowledge— episteme —is not attainable in practical matters), but to guide the societies of men back to the acme of development from which they may have fallen. I can only say that others may discern an ambition in Vico to lead men to new heights: this insight is withheld from me. Of course Vico, like all men, displays some political preferences and biases; but nothing in his text seems to me directly to advocate practical policies; I am, however, not expert (I admit) at reading between the lines. No doubt Vico did think that his treatise, by illuminating the course of the self-transformation of humanity, contributed to political wisdom—virtually all historians before Ranke'thought of themselves as doing this, and many doubtless think it still. But it is one thing to believe in the lessons of history—history as a collettion of exempla —another to look on it as essen­ tially action directed. Vico, the companion, or even the forerunner, of Lenin and Gramsci seems to me as implausible as Vico the anticipator of Popper;