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mediate line of descent from Vico. The idea is nevertheless a specious
one and does not stand up to the scrutiny of those who know Vico's
work well. Several of the best articles in this collection are devoted to
demonstrating the fundamental discrepancies between Vico's writ–
ings and those of Marx. Thus David Lachterman points out that
Marx situates his tribute to Vico in the middle of a discussion of the
influence of the forces of production in shaping social change. Marx's
conception of history is shaped by an ontology of human labor based
on the production and reproduction of the material means of ex–
istence. But Vico does not regard the dynamic properties of human
history as lying in the subordination of nature; rather, human beings
make their own history by creating a social world of custom and
ritual which serves to tame their originally animal nature. Leon
Pompa argues that Vico takes the content of "ideologies" much more
seriously than Marx does, tracing Marx's failures in this respect
again to the tenets of the materialist conception of history. Finally,
in a well-documented discussion, Ball shows that the history which
Marx's human beings "make" is quite different from that which is
"made" in the Vichean version of social development. In fact, he
claims, Marx misunderstood what Vico had in mind when speaking
of the 'making' of the social world . Marx naturally interpreted the
term to mean fabrication, production . But Vico sought to defend the
very distinction between
techne
and
praxis
which Marx collapsed into
a single dimension of human activity . Human beings 'make' a life for
themselves precisely insofar as they manage to separate themselves
from nature, in the
praxis
of the creation of an intersubjectively mean–
ingful social life, rooted in myth and in language.
If
it be granted that the similarities between Vico and Marx are
not all that close, it makes more, rather than less, sense to compare
their views. For if Vico is no longer perched in the convenient niche,
"forerunner of Marx," it might be possible to rehabilitate him as a
writer whose ideas need to be taken as seriously as those of Marx in
regard to their potential relevance to the social sciences in the cur–
rent era. After all, Marx's historical materialism does today seem
less than adequate as a guide to explicating patterns of social change ;
Marx certainly did not give enough attention to the interpretation of
language as a necessary and basic concern of social analysis; and the
"Promethean" teleology which Marx sought to uncover in human
history looks remote indeed from the fractured and troubled world of
the twentieth century. In several of the other contributions to this
book, it is indeed suggested that Vico has more to teach us, at least
