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Vico and Naples is an intellectual portrait of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) that reveals the politics and motivations of one of Europe's first scientists of society. According to the commonplaces of the literature on the Neapolitan, Vico was a solitary figure who, at a remove from the political life of his larger community, steeped himself in the recondite debates of classical scholarship to produce his magnum opus, the New Science. Barbara Ann Naddeo shows, however, that at the outset of his career Vico was deeply engaged in the often-tumultuous life of his great city and that his experiences of civic crises shaped his inquiry into the origins and development of human society.
With its attention to Vico's historical, rhetorical, and jurisprudential texts, this book recovers a Vico who was keenly attuned to the social changes transforming the political culture of his native city. He understood the crisis of the city's corporate social order and described the new social groupings that would shape its future. In Naddeo's pages, Vico comes alive as a prescient judge of his city and the political conundrum of Europe’s burgeoning metropolises. He was dedicated to the acknowledgment and juridical remedy of Naples’ vexing social divisions and ills. Naddeo also presents biographical vignettes illuminating Vico’s role as a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples and his bid for the prestigious Morning Chair of Civil Law, which foundered on the directives of the Habsburgs and the politics of his native city. Rich with period detail, this book is a compelling and vivid reconstruction of Vico’s life and times and of the origins of his powerful notion of the social.
Barbara Ann Naddeo is Associate Professor of History at CUNY: The City College of New York.
"Barbara Ann Naddeo makes a powerful new case for Vico's originality as a social thinker; and she does so with fine historical craftsmanship, setting his work back into the Naples he knew and the circles of lawyers and noblemen for whom he wrote. This is high scholarship, as precise as it is imaginative."
Helena Rosenblatt, The Graduate Center, CUNY:
"A book such as Vico and Naples is long overdue. Barbara Ann Naddeo places Vico squarely within both the intellectual debates and the historical and political circumstances of eighteenth-century Naples. Naddeo treats Vico as a politically engaged individual, and the result is a fascinating and very believable argument about one of the most innovative thinkers of his time. It is also an illuminating explanation of what Vico meant by what he said. This is intellectual history at its best."
Thora Ilin Bayer:
"Naddeo's work is a welcome corrective to the view of Vico as a lone thinker completely out of his own time.... It gives us a much needed perspective on a fundamental aspect of Vico’s thought leading up to the New Science, the one work for which Vico claimed he wished to be remembered, [and] an understanding of the social and political contexts of Vico’s philosophy."
Cecilia Miller:
"Naddeo... is to be applauded for highlighting neglected ideas in the supposedly minor works by Vico that have been ignored by scholars for centuries. Naddeo gives us a different Vico, sharper and more deeply enmeshed in his own culture. This process of transformation is disturbing, challenging and ultimately rewarding for those who know Vico well."
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