Neither/nor: Vico beyond Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment

It is a distinguishing mark of the most original minds that they can be redescribed by intellectual historians as representatives of widely divergent or mutually exclusive traditions in the history of thought.  So it is with Giambattista Vico.  Inducted into the Counter-Enlightenment as a founding member by Isaiah Berlin and transformed into a thorough-going anti-modern by Mark Lilla, Vico is at the same time held to be both a figure in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment and, in John Robertson’s work, a confirmation that the Enlightenment can be spoken of as a single process because its Scottish and Neapolitan forms exhibit strikingly similarities.  This paper compares and contrasts the competing claims of those who, alternatively, wish to see Vico as a representative of the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment.  It concludes that, theoretically, it is possible for an author’s work to be part of two such opposed movements.  Such paradoxes are not uncommon in intellectual history.  In this case, however, I argue that Vico’s place in intellectual history cannot be located simply by seeking to align him with one or other of these camps.  Neither the Enlightenment nor the Counter-Enlightenment can claim Vico without evacuating his thought of its most distinctive and valuable features.  Having begun in this way with a critique of the overweening dialectic of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, I go on to argue that Vico’s project is best understood as a transformation of the rhetorical tradition that he inherited as a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples.  My thesis is that Vico achieved a radical revision of the ars rhetorica by jettisoning the Greco-Roman rhetorical tradition’s most absolute presupposition: the assumption that, in order to be analyzable in rhetorical terms, a society must possess institutions in which orator and auditor come together for the purposes of political action.