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

Corsi e Ricorsi Sir Isaiah Berlin All Souls College, Oxford University The history of Vico’s reputation is an ironical reflection of his own cyclical theory of culture: obscure beginnings, slow development, rise to fame and influence, followed by an inevitable decline and fall, after which the entire cycle is repeated once again—we cannot be sure how soon or how often. More than half a century passed after the publication of the first edition of Vico’ most original and important work, the Scienza Nuova, before any serious attention was paid to it outside his native city. Herder's friend Hamann sent for it from Konigsberg in 1777: when it arrived, he made nothing of it. There was some criticism of it in Germany at the time of publication; Thomasius had heard of Vico; but the founders of modem historical method, the Gottingen professors of the later eighteenth century, knew nothing of the author or his work; passing references to the Scienza Nuova by Goethe and Herder showed no genuine acquaintance with it. It was admired in Naples and, perhaps, briefly in Venice. Despite the prop­ aganda by Italian scholars—Duni, Genovesi, Cesarotti, Pagano, the abbe Galiani—and later by Italian exiles in Paris at the the century, and by Orelli and the poet Leopardi in Rome, despite mc-fruerest in his ideas taken by such secondary figures as Chastellux, Degerando, de Maistre, Fauriel, Jacobi, Victor Cousin, and Coleridge, he remained largely unread and unknown: at most, a curious, half-forgotten provincial writer in the margin of scholarship and thought. His rescuer and most eloquent champion was Jules Michelet, whose imagination was deeply stirred by the New Science. Michelet’s free version of Vico’s doctrines, published in 1824, and, above all, his fervent advocacy for a while gave Vico European fame. Marx, Thomas Arnold, Buckle, Ballanche, and Herzen spoke of him with respect from very different points of view. But although Michelet continued to draw inspiration from his writings until the end of his life (or so he claimed), the inevitable decline in Vico’s fame duly set in. Despite highly intelligent and lucid monographs by Karl Werner in Germany and Robert Flint in England, it was due solely to the insistence of Benedetto Croce, who admired and was prodoundly influenced by him, that Windelband agreed to add a foot­ note on Vico in his famous history of philosophy. Still, he did not remain totally unknown even in the North; Yeats and Joyce read him —Finnegans Wake is full of Vico—he was discussed in prerevolutionary Russia; Georges Sorel in Paris wrote a long essay on his doctrines in the nineties: a new cycle, a ricorso, had begun. For this Croce was almost wholly responsible: his celebrated study of Vico’s thought! and the great edition of Vico's entire work, the main direction of which Croce, in effect, entrusted to Fausto Nicolini who devoted his long life to it, bore fruit beyond the frontiers of {Journal o f Modem History 30 (September 1978): 480-489] © 1978 by The University of Chka#o. 0022-2801/78/5003-001 IS00.93