Note on Vico and Marx
In the translators' Introduction to The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, the Marxist tradition is referred to as "one movement of international proportions in which [Vico's] name and ideas have constantly recurred, and which may, more than others, have his future reputation in its hands."(1) This assessment, made in 1944, was inaccurate. Within the Marxist tradition Vichian scholarship continues. However, wholly outside of this tradition, it presently flourishes.(2)
I believe there are only three known written reference by Marx to Vico.
1.) In a letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx writes:
It surprises me that you seem not to have read Vico's New Science - not for anything you would have found in it for your special purpose, but for its philosophic conception of the spirit of Roman law in opposition to the legal Philistines. . . . Vico contains in the germ Wolf (on Homer), Niebuhr (on Roman history in the 'regal' period), the foundations of comparative philology (not without caprice), and a great deal else that is original.(3)
2.) In a letter to Engels, Marx writes:
Vico says in his New Science that Germany is the only country in Europe where 'an heroic language' is still spoken. If he had ever had the pleasure of acquainting himself with the Vienna Presse or the Berlin Nationalzeitung, the old Neapolitan would have changed his mind.(4)
3.) Finally, in a footnote to Capital, Marx writes:
Before [John Watt's] time, spinning machines, although very imperfect ones, had already been used, and Italy was probably the country of their first appearance. A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the 18th century are the work of a single individual. Hitherto there is no such book. Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter?(5)
Why, with these limited references, would the Marxist tradition seemingly embrace Vico? It is perhaps not due so much to Vico's influence on Marx,(6) but the affinity of their theories.
The philosophical ideas of Vico and Marx have a comparable general setting, represented by the synthesis of philosophy and philology in Vico and the synthesis of theory and practice in Marx. They also have an analogous dominant focus on man in his concrete historical situation, and a similar encyclopaedic range. Furthermore, both Vico and Marx conceive human nature as changeable in the course of history, while maintaining that this does not obviate the need for the search and discovery of the law regulating change. Both hold that this law is dictated by the efforts of men to satisfy their material needs.(7)
To this estimation should be added the importance of class struggle to both Marx's and Vico's conception of historical development.(8)
Carl Mickelsen carlmick@moscow.com
1. Vico, The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico 104 ( M.H. Fisch and T.G. Bergin trans., Cornell U. Press 1944) (1725 & 1731). As far as the recurrence of Vico's name, see, as simply a sampling of many examples, Trotsky's reference in the third paragraph of The Russian Revolution and Gramsci's references in "The Modern Prince" and The Prison Notebooks.2. As of 1944, only small parts of Vico’s works had been translated into English. Now, in 1999, virtually all of his works are readily available in translation. (In this regard, see the highly commercialized Giambattista Vico Home Page.) "The bibliography of writings concerning Vico, or quoting him, that are available in English, now contains approximately five hundred authors, including such thinkers as Derrida, Eco, Foucalt, Deleuze, Frye, Gadamer, Habermas, Hayden White." http://www.connix.com/~gapinton/pasandpres.html
3. Quoted from Introduction to Autobiography 104, citing Lassalle: Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, ed. G. Mayer, III, 387 f.
4. Quoted from Introduction to Autobiography 104, which cites Marx/Engels Gesamtausgabe, 3 Abt., III, 63.
5. Marx, Capital, vol. I, 372 n. 3 (1867). This plays on ideas central to both Vico and Marx. For Vico, it is a central epistemic thesis that the true (verum) is identical with the made (factum). See Vico's On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, Ch. One, I (1710). Compare to Marx's Theses on Feuerbach, II (1845): "The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. In practice man must prove the truth . . . ."
6. Fisch and Bergin state that "Marx and Engels seem to have taken from Vico . . . the formula that 'men make their own history,' from which their historical materialism was developed." Introduction to Autobiography 105. This, however, seems highly improbable in light of the fact that the notion that 'men make their own history' is implicitly, at least, already to be found in Feuerbach, Marx's immediate intellectual predecessor. Feuerbach was largely reacting to Hegel who, for Feuerbach, represented the "culmination of modern philosophy." Principles of the Philosophy of the Future § 19 (1843). According to Hegel, history was the self-development of God/Reason/Idea. Feuerbach's transformational criticism demonstrates, however, that "the secret of theology is anthropology; that the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind." Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity Ch. XXVII (1843).
7. Preface, Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts (Giorgio Tagliacozzo ed., Humanities Press 1983). http://www.connix.com/~gapinton/marx.html
8. Awareness of the importance of class struggle to historical development can be traced at least as far back as Aristotle's The Athenian Constitution (350 B.C.). However, prior to Marx, Vico's New Science (1725) gives this idea its most comprehensive treatment.
