A short life of the author
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) was a Neapolitan professor of rhetoric who spent his career in relative obscurity at the University of Naples. His masterwork, Scienza Nuova (New Science, first edition 1725, substantially revised 1730 and 1744), argued that human history follows a recurring cycle of three ages — the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men — each with its own forms of language, law, government, and consciousness.
Vico’s most radical insight was that human beings can fully understand only what they themselves have made — verum ipsum factum (“the true is the made”) — and that the proper study of humanity is therefore history and culture, not the natural sciences. This made him a forerunner of historicism, hermeneutics, and cultural anthropology.
He was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by Michelet (who translated him into French), and his ideas influenced Hegel, Marx, Croce, and Isaiah Berlin. James Joyce drew heavily on Vico’s cyclical theory for the structure of Finnegans Wake.
Collecting Vico
The three editions of Scienza Nuova (1725, 1730, 1744) are extremely rare eighteenth-century Italian texts, held primarily by research libraries and traded through antiquarian dealers specialising in philosophy and early modern Italian books. Modern translations — particularly the Bergin and Fisch translation (Cornell University Press, 1948) — are the standard scholarly editions and bring $50–$200 in first edition.