Vico: The First New Science (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Hardcover, lxiv + 302 pages, NOT ex-library. Missing the front blank endpaper. Extensive pencil underlining and marginalia on 63 pages. Else clean, bright, untanned, free of stamps, firmly bound. Residue of a partially removed sticker on the boards. Issued without a dust jacket. -- Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) was a Neapolitan professor of rhetoric who spent his career at the University of Naples in relative obscurity, yet produced one of the most original works in the history of Western thought. His Scienza nuova, first published in 1725, proposed that the study of human civilisation could be placed on a scientific footing. Against the dominant Cartesian philosophy of his age, Vico argued that the world of nations and cultures - its languages, laws, myths and institutions - is more knowable than the natural world, because human beings themselves created it. He charted how civilisations develop through recurring cycles of growth and decline, driven not by rational calculation but by imagination, poetry and collective custom, and he insisted that the earliest human thought was fundamentally different from modern reasoning - an insight that prefigured modern anthropology, sociology and the philosophy of history. Largely unread in his lifetime, Vico was rediscovered in the 19th century through Jules Michelet's French translation and went on to influence thinkers as diverse as Marx, Croce, Joyce and Isaiah Berlin. This translation by Leon Pompa, a leading Vico scholar at the University of Birmingham, makes available in English the complete text of the 1725 first edition - the most concise of the three versions Vico produced (1725, 1730, 1744) and widely regarded by scholars as the clearest statement of his intentions. A number of Vico scholars have persistently argued that it is also the most readable, free of the elaborations and structural complications that encumbered the later versions. Pompa's introduction and annotations provide the contextual apparatus to make this demanding but rewarding text fully accessible to the English-language reader.…