Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe, by David L. Marshall.

Abstract

Vico and Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe, by David L. Marshall. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010. viii, 302 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). Published in 2010, David L. Marshall's book is already widely known by Vico scholars across world, and, references to it on internet are anything to go by, its reputation is growing. This recognition is well deserved. Marshall interprets whole oeuvre of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), professor of at University of Naples, with great erudition and invention. Brian Vickers's and, especially, Nancy S. Struever's achievements seem to be his main intellectual resources, with their recognition of significance of in modern age. Though Vico delivered lectures on art of persuasion as university professor from 1699 onwards, subject of somehow all but disappeared from his works after 1710. This book attempts to offer an explanation for this curious omission, claiming that if one wants to construct an overarching account of what Vico achieved as a thinker, then single best line of inquiry to follow is his sublimation of rhetoric (p. 4). Marshall thus proposes a narrative of sublimation to show constitutive, yet invisible presence of in Vico's thought. By sublimation he means, roughly, a special intellectual process whereby Vico, as it were, deconstructs classical categories of rhetoric, transforms (or transfigures) them, then constructs a new discourse from them--a new science of applied to circumstances of modern age. Classical was bound up with, and grew out of, political experience of Athenian polis and Roman republic; most pressing question for Vico was how one can renew to allow it to operate within completely different political and historical context of early eighteenth-century Naples. Thus, ironically, the absence of oratorical institutions ... drives Vico toward a more sophisticated understanding of rhetoric (p. 196). In this narrative, Marshall ingeniously reinterprets--sometimes going against received scholarly opinion--the major Vichian topics including verum-factum principle, famous conceptions of true Homer or of poetic wisdom and differences between three editions of Scienza nuova, etc. The Conclusion chapter comprises an outline of reaction to Vico in Naples in second half of eighteenth century, concluding with a presentation of Vincenzo Cuoco's reflections on failure of 1799 revolution in Naples. As for Marshall, he, who advocated a kind a political education to foster communication between elite and many, was the first to intuit Vico's sublimation of rhetoric (p. 271). From this viewpoint, Vico's whole intellectual enterprise can be retrospectively seen as a transformation of classical into a cultural politics of communication. However, some terms which are crucial in Marshall's analysis, ingenium (wit), sensus communis, and sublime are also categories of modern theories of aesthetics, and as such may be quite familiar from historical narratives of modern aesthetics, yet it seems to me that Marshall rather neglects these. I would also raise one more point. This book draws many illuminating comparisons between Vico and his predecessors and contemporaries (the list is truly impressive), yet one name is surprisingly lacking: Lord Shaftesbury. Although he was contemporary of Vico, he also had a profound Humanist background and, as a point of interest, he was also a fellow-citizen of Vico's, since Shaftesbury moved to Naples in 1711 and died there in 1713. …