Giambattista Vico's ‘Constructive’ Language and its Post-Revolutionary Readers

Abstract

Reprinted in 1801, Vico's New Science (originally published 1744) had a profound impact on Bourbon Restoration culture, particularly in Italy and France, where it touched post-revolutionary readers profoundly. The reasons for Vico's revival in the early nineteenth century relate closely to the trauma of the political and social changes of that era. Vico's readership seems to have had significant peaks during periods of rapid social transformation: nineteenth-century readers reread the New Science in an attempt to find the reasons for revolutionary failure, and to relate the terror, the sense of displacement, failure and trauma to recognizable laws, promising that, after a crisis, a period of renaissance must necessarily follow. This article analyses the hermeneutic practices of some post-revolutionary readers of Vico (Carlo Cattaneo, Vincenzo Cuoco, Giuseppe Ferrari, Ugo Foscolo, Francesco Lomonaco) and suggests a comparison with the practices of readers during the Second World War (Eric Auerbach, Carlo Levi, Mario Fubini). By doing so, I propose an interpretation of Vico's New Science as a ‘posthumous’ book, acquiring special shades of significance when its readers experience the feeling that nothing will ever be like before, and meditate upon it in isolation, in fear, in exile, upon return from the front, and in prison.