Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Giambettista Vico, an international symposium, 1969

Elio Gianturco VICO ’S SIGNIFICANCE IN THE H ISTORY OF LEGAL THOUGHT Introduction It is a matter o f general knowledge that the so-called revival o f Vico’s reputation in our century was given decisive impetus by B. Croce’s mono­ graph published in 1 9 1 1.1 In retrospect, with this monograph Croce appears to have performed for Vico in the twentieth century the same service that Michelet did in the nineteenth. Croce bestowed on Vico’s renown a new lease on European and trans-European life. His book, though fully deserv­ ing the applause that greeted it on its appearance and that it continued to enjoy in subsequent years, and though admirable in the masterliness o f its “ cut,” in the harmonious proportionality o f its structure, in its close empathetic adherence, and in the consummate skill with which large masses o f the original texts are melted into the substance of the critical exposition, is nevertheless marked by certain blemishes. At the time o f writing, Croce’s antagonism toward all forms o f positivism had reached its acme. We must hold fast to the fact that Italian positivism between 1890 and 1910 was especially dominant in the field o f sociological and legal studies. Vico had been set up as an idol by the positivistic jurists, especially those of southern Italy. It had become the vogue among them to portray him as a jusphilosophical precursor o f Hegel and to interpret his thought through Hegelian spectacles. Croce views Vico through these spectacles, but he is firmly determined to wrest the “ Vico monopoly” from juristic circles. Accordingly, he portrays Vico as his lineal forebear in idealistic im- manentism, as preponderantly a metaphysician, and as the discoverer, before Baumgarten, o f the modern discipline o f aesthetics. (Croce had published his own Aesthetics in 1901; in it, Vico’s role in the revaluation o f the imagina­ tion is duly brought out.2) In the 19 11 monograph the epistemological 1 B . Croce, La JUosoJia di G . B. Vico (Bari: Laterza, 19 11). This work was reprinted in paperback form in 1965. The English translation by R . G. Collingwood, first published in 19 13, was reprinted by Russell and Russell (New York) in 1964. The most recent Croce bibliography, which supplements the previous one by E. Cione (Rome, 1956), is that edited by Silvano Borsari for the Istituto Italiano di Studi Storici (Naples, 1964), entitled L'opera di Benedetto Croce. 2 Estetica, 6th ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1928), pp. 242-58. 327