I

Increasingly, since the French Revolution, the Western world has pursued a curious line of thought. It has persuaded itself that, in human affairs, there is genuine historical novelty—novelty that cannot be described or explained or assessed in terms that remain essentially unchanged (committed to strict invariance). The rise of capitalism and the formation of the bourgeoisie appear to be novel, genuinely unique in this sense, however continuous with earlier social structures. They are entirely sui generis, possibly not subsumable under covering laws. Nevertheless, this new sense of history is characteristically not permitted to challenge the prevailing assumption that, through it all, purely physical events remain subject to the invariant, exceptionless laws of nature.

The modern world has been endlessly juggling these apparently irreconcilable doctrines. For instance, if the second held firm, it would be reasonable to doubt that the first was reliably in touch with all that was real. Otherwise, their compatibility suggests a profound dualism between the natural and geistlich "worlds" (not a dualism between the body and the mind). Even more radically, the straightforward reality reported in the first suggests that the seeming invariances of the second may be mere illusions, idealizations, fictions, conveniences of some sort subject to special longings internal to the world of the first.

The most extraordinary anticipation of this puzzle (hardly its solution) appears in Vico's New Science , possibly the first genuinely large

conception of history that we think of as spanning the French Revolution and its aftermath and what, in advance of those events, dawningly prepared the Western world for them. Vico discovered an ingenious way of integrating the endless transient novelty of the human world and the invariances he firmly believed a suitable science rationally required. He domesticated historical novelty by bringing it under the control of a higher invariance. In this, Vico means to correct Descartes's very large mistake. Descartes disjoins res cogitans and res extensa (and then of course rejoins them); but he believes the natural light of reason proceeds in precisely the same way in both domains. Vico disagrees. He believes that human reason is not adequately guided or governed in the "geometric" way suited to nature—in its own sphere: history. The reason is that man is a kind of mortal god in human affairs. He understands human history because he is its true "creator":

But in the night of thick darkness [says Vico] enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects on this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows; and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations or civil world, which, since men made it, men could hope to know. This aberration was a consequence of that infirmity of the mind . . . by which, immersed and buried in the body, it naturally inclines to take notice of bodily things, and finds the effort to attend to itself too laborious; just as the bodily eye sees and finds all objects outside itself but needs a mirror to see itself.^[1]

Vico adds almost at once that the science he speaks of, history, like the science of the created world of which it is a part, must accord with "the orders established therein by providence [which are] universal and eternal."^[2] Hence, though what belongs to history may well be "hidden from men, [that is,] the future, or . . . hidden in them, their consciousness," history is precisely what they should seek to know and what they alone can discern.^[3]

Appealing to divine providence, then, Vico is able to reconcile the transient novelty and the invariance of human affairs. If we understood the providential "orders" established in history as in nature, he says, "our Science" (history) would penetrate "the affairs of the nations" and grasp the inevitability that collects them—that is, that "the course of [those] affairs . . . had to be, must now be and will have to be such as

our Science demonstrates, even if infinite worlds were produced from time to time through eternity."^[4] The necessity of history is not a form of external or reductive determinism—one merely in accord with the laws of physical nature (or geometrical reasoning); it depends instead on the providentially assigned nature of the human species, though what human nature is is only dimly perceived through history's inventions. Sifting through all that, Vico imagines that his Science "comes to describe at the same time an ideal eternal history traversed in time by the history of every nation in its rise, progress, maturity, decline and fall."

In this, history

proceeds exactly as does geometry, which, while it constructs out of its elements or contemplates the world of quantity, itself creates it, but with a reality greater in proportion to that of the orders having to do with human affairs, in which there are neither points, lines, surfaces, nor figures. And this very fact [adds Vico] is an argument, O reader, that these proofs are of a kind divine, and should give thee a divine pleasure; since in God knowledge and creation are one and the same thing.^[5]

Man is at once the creator and the discerning scientist of the singular events of human history. But his inquiries must also accord with the higher invariances of his own nature , as with those of every pertinent order of nature similarly ordained. Universal history is the recovery of the inclusive significance of the narrative history of the entire race, however opaquely instantiated in the local events of this or that society.

What Vico dazzlingly demonstrates is this: if we find it impossible to explain the events of the human world solely in terms of the invariances of physical nature, or if we distinguish disjunctively between the categories by which we understand physical nature and "geometric reason" on the one hand and those suited for understanding history on the other, then unless we link the invariances of human history to the power of God, to a power outside the created world altogether, we shall find it impossible to justify the claim that there are such invariances in history at all . Q.E.D.

In short, the idea of the universal history of the world is a privileged "theological" device for ensuring the extension of something of the classical conception of science to human history. If Vico had only acknowledged, in addition to acknowledging man's having "created" his own world, that human reason is also a historical "product" of some sort , a competence not immutably ordered, he would have anticipated all the daring themes that emerged shortly thereafter in the theory of

history ranging from Hegel to Marx to Nietzsche to Heidegger to Foucault at least. This is not yet to approve the claims of these later theorists: Vico would doubtless have found their theories quite alien. But if we are to understand the rise of the contemporary view of history, we must realize that Vico was tempted in a way he could not rightly fathom. He takes a giant step in the direction of the moderns, but he falls back to the thought and speech of the ancients. He grasps the constructed historical nature of the human world but not the equally constructed nature of human reason. So he rightly claims a discovery Descartes had failed to make; and yet, for all that, his theory sounds more alien to us than Descartes's. The novelty of his history hangs in the balance.

Still, Vico is an original. His premise is the sine qua non of historical understanding: human events—the political and economic and artistic and technological and scientific and theological and linguistic and mythic and narrative elements of the real world (of human society)—are "originally" (and thereafter) produced by men and, being their work , their "creation," those events are intelligible only in terms that reflect man's own nature and history . Vico harbors no fears on that score: he believes the contingent changes of human history instantiate the invariant nature of man, which, as with the ancients, embodies a changeless moral and practical wisdom: "let him who would transgress the rules of social life binding on all nations beware [he says] lest he transgress all humanity."^[6]