Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

Considered the most original thinker in the Italian philosophical tradition Giambattista Vico has been the object of much scholarly attention but little consensus. In this new interpretation David L. Marshall examines the entirety of Vico''s oeuvre and situates him in the political context of early modern Naples. Marshall presents Vico''s work as an effort to resolve a contradiction. As a professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples Vico had a deep investment in the explanatory power of classical rhetorical thought especially that of Aristotle Cicero and Quintilian. Yet as a historian of the failure of Naples as a self-determining political community he had no illusions about the possibility or worth of democratic and republican systems of government in the post-classical world. As Marshall demonstrates by jettisoning the assumption that rhetoric only illuminates direct face-to-face interactions between orator and auditor Vico reinvented rhetoric for a modern world in which the Greek polis and the Roman res publica are no longer paradigmatic for political thought.