nor the more plausibly drawn quasi-Hegelian metaphysician celebrated by Croce (still less Gentile’s bold variation of this), nor Enzo Paci’s proto-existentialist, nor Nicola Badaloni’s naturalistic forerunner of Feuerbach, reveal enough of Vico’s own original shape and colour. The devoted labours of the most scrupulous, scholarly and dedicated of the editors and glossators of Vico, Fausto Nicolini, provide a marvelous monument of lucid learning, but no more. There is, as in the case of all authentic thinkers, no substitute for reading the original. This is no easy labour, but – here one can speak only from personal experience – the reward is great. Few intellectual pleasures are comparable to the discovery of a thinker of the first water.
Giovanni Battista Vico was born in 1668, the son of a bookseller in Naples. He died there in 1774, Apart from the few years which he spent in nearby Vatolla in Cilento, as a tutor to the sons of Domenico Rocca, Marchese di Vatolla, he never left Naples. All his life he had hoped to be appointed to the principal chair of jurisprudence in his native city, but succeeded only in holding various lower posts in the related field of ‘rhetoric’, ending with an inferior professorship which he held from 1699 until 1741. It provided him with a modest salary, and obliged him to deliver a number of inaugural lectures, some of which contain his most original ideas. He eked out his low income by accepting commissions from the rich and the grand to write Latin inscriptions, official eulogies and laudatory biographies of important persons. The best-known of these are his life of Antonio Caraffa, a Neapolitan condottiere in the service of the Emperor, and an account of the unsuccessful Macchia conspiracy in Naples. Caraffa’s campaigns involved Vici in the study of inter-state relations, and it is probably this that caused him to readGrotius and other philosophical jurists. This had a decisive effect on his own ideas. The story of the Macchia was concerned with an attempt made at the turn of the century to replace Spanish by Auetrian rule in Naples. The plot was uncovered and in 1701 the ringleaders were executed by the Spaniards. In 1702 Vico published an account of the conspiracy denouncing the participants as criminals and