Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe

This book examines the entirety of Giambattista Vico's oeuvre and demonstrates his significance as a theorist who adapted the discipline of rhetoric to modern conditions.

David L. Marshall (Author)

9780521190626, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2010

312 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm, 0.63 kg

'This book is one of a kind. That Vico was a professor of rhetoric, wrote a textbook on rhetoric, and taught rhetoric throughout his long career is frequently forgotten as a key to understanding his work. Although several authors have given significant attention to the rhetorical basis of Vico's thought, none have placed Vico at the center of the development of rhetoric in the modern period, as Marshall's study does. The reader of this work gains a full, original, and rewarding account of Vico's place in intellectual history that is not to be found elsewhere and done in a manner that is a pleasure to read.' Donald Phillip Verene, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy, Director, Institute of Vico Studies, Emory University

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.

1. Introduction
2. At the limits of classical rhetoric
3. Redacting the art of persuasion
4. An epistemic rhetoric
5. Towards a hermeneutic theory of law and culture
6. The new science of rhetoric
7. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]