History Man
John Robertson, 4 November 1993
The current fascination with Vico in the English-speaking world owes almost everything to the attention he has received from Isaiah Berlin. Before Berlin, Vico was the obscure Neapolitan philosopher who had been ‘discovered’ a hundred years after his death by Michelet and the Romantics, and was subsequently made much of by Italian philosophers understandably anxious to demonstrate the continuing originality of their national culture in the long interval since the Renaissance. Since 1960, however, a series of essays by Berlin has expounded Vico’s leading ideas and displayed their significance in terms which have made him much more readily accessible to philosophers, political theorists and intellectual historians, and which have persuaded a wider public of his centrality to Western culture.
