[ book tip by Katy Barrett ] I want you to close your eyes. You are in a book-lined study in seventeenth-century Naples. At a desk, sits Giambattista Vico. Over his shoulder you see that he is writing a New Science. It is getting dark…

How does one imagine seventeenth-century Naples? Perhaps at this point you are already struggling. Why should you read a seventeenth-century academic text on human society? Well, let Vico re-kindle your imagination.

In this anniversary year of Charles Darwin, Vico’s picture of the evolution of societies is particularly intriguing. In his New Science, Vico set out to prove 'scientifically' that all human societies develop from similar events and principles: thunder and lightning frightened primitive man into caves for shelter, beginning the development of social interaction, homes, and belief in a higher power. All societies follow this natural, self-recognising pattern, and consequently contain the seeds of all other societies.

In his own isolated corner of Italy, Vico placed seventeenth-century Europe within a cycle which connected backwards to pre-history and sideways to the New World. He argued that human society was natural and developed based on the evolution of 'natural' poetry. Language itself taught man to express his own passions and reason to build a 'civilised' society. He pictured the 'divine' as a form of the natural 'common sense' shared by all men. In his approach, Vico anticipated the modern study of at least ethnography, philology, and sociology.

In this edition of the New Science, Bergin and Fisch highlight Vico's wonderfully subtle use of Italian, bringing out the linguistic depth of his own use of language. The reader thus appreciates the beauty of Vico's ideas before they even open the main text. In this story of natural, equal, and vocal human development, Vico's academic text is both self-fulfilling and consummately relevant to modern concerns.

[ Favourite quote ] 'From the theology of the poets... by way of the poetic logic sprung from it, we go on to discover the origin of languages and letters.' (p.138)

[ book info ] Vico, Giambattista: The New Science of Giambattista Vico. Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of . (original language: English/Italian) Thomas Goddard Bergin, Max Harold Fisch (Translators). Cornell University Press, London, 1968 (1744). ISBN: 0-8014-9265-3.