Giambattista Vico 1668 – 1744

Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher of history, rhetorician, and jurist working in obscurity at Naples. Against the Cartesian privileging of mathematical natural science, he argued in his New Science that human beings can know the human world precisely because they have made it. He proposed that all nations pass through a recurring cycle of three ages, the divine, the heroic, and the human, each with its own forms of language, law, and imagination. Long neglected, his work shaped Romanticism, German historicism, and twentieth-century thinkers from James Joyce to Isaiah Berlin.

Key facts

Nationality: Italian
Era: Modern
Movements: Early Modern

Selected quotes

Attributed to Giambattista Vico:

“The true and the made are convertible.”
Attributed to Giambattista Vico:

“Common sense is judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race.”
Attributed to Giambattista Vico:

“Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad squandering their estates.”
Attributed to Giambattista Vico:

“The order of ideas must follow the order of things.”
Attributed to Giambattista Vico:

“Governments must conform to the nature of the men governed.”