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Thinkers

Giambattista Vico

Early Modern · Europe · 1668 to 1744

Italian thinker who argued that we can understand human societies from the inside, because people made them. He said they pass through repeating stages.

What it is

Giambattista Vico (1668 to 1744) was an Italian philosopher, rhetorician and historian from Naples. He trained in law and spent most of his working life as Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Naples. His great work, The New Science, argues that we can understand human societies from the inside, because people made them.

He was little known in his own time. From the nineteenth century his ideas found a wider audience, and today he is read across the humanities and the social sciences. He is credited with starting the modern philosophy of history, and with early ideas in social science and the study of signs.

The main ideas

  • We know what we make. His principle, in Latin verum factum, says that truth is something made. In his view we can know the human world, with its laws, customs, languages and history, in a way we cannot know nature, because people made it.
  • A new science of society. The New Science sets out to understand the growth of peoples through their language, poetry, law and religion, not just their rulers and battles.
  • Against pure method. He criticised the way Cartesian reasoning and other reductionism strip away what matters in human life, and he defended the humanities: rhetoric, history and poetry.
  • Learning from the ancients. He defended classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and weighed the strengths and weaknesses of ancient and modern learning.
  • Language and history. He saw philology, the study of words and texts, as a way into the history of cultures.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine trying to understand why an old law was written the way it was. A Cartesian approach might look for a clear definition. Vico would ask what kind of life, fears and stories surrounded the people who made it, and would treat the law as a clue to a whole way of living. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times (1709) was his inaugural address, on the best way to teach and learn.
  • The New Science (first published in 1725, rewritten in 1730, a third edition in 1744) is his major work.

Questions and criticism

  • Obscure in his own day. He was little known when alive, and some readers find his writing dense and unusual.
  • Is the human world really knowable in this way? If we know best what we make, it is fair to ask how far that extends to societies no one planned.
  • A different Enlightenment. His stress on rhetoric and history set him apart from the reason-first thinking of his age, and readers still argue about how to place him.

Close neighbours

René Descartes is the thinker whose method Vico argued against, and the page on Francis Bacon shows another thinker whose philosophy he engaged.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • G. W. F. Hegel · Vico's idea of history moving through stages is seen as a forerunner of Hegel's. (scholars disagree about this link)
  • Karl Marx · Marx mentions Vico's point that people make their own history. (scholars disagree about this link)

Reacted against

  • René Descartes · Vico argued that the human world made by people is better known than nature, against Cartesian method.

Other Early Modern thinkers

Sources we used

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