ABSTRACT
In a work as celebrated and controversial as Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, even the footnotes have generated substantial commentaries. Perhaps none has been as extensive as that sparked by the note Marx devoted to the then little-known 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico.1 Until a recent critique by Eugene Kamenka,2 it had been generally assumed that this note, the only reference to Vico in all of Marx’s published writings, indicated an intellectual debt of considerable proportions. Although the size of that debt now seems somewhat smaller, thanks to Kamenka’s arguments, it is nonetheless true that Marxists of a wide variety of persuasions have been eager to appropriate Vico’s legacy for their own purposes. These purposes have not, however, always been alike and so, not surprisingly, Vico has meant different things to different Marxists. For the theoreticians of the Second International, such as Paul Lafargue and Antonio Labriola,3 he was understood as the anticipator of Marx’s objective laws of historical development. In particular, his belief in an “ideal eternal history” traversed by all peoples (with the exception of the Hebrews) was interpreted as a prefiguration of Marx’s supposed assertion of an evolutionary path followed by all developing societies. Similarly, Vico’s continued faith in providential intervention in the affairs of men was understood as a religious version of the Hegelian idea of “the cunning of Reason,” which was itself secularized still further in Marx’s idea of historical forces working behind the backs and against the wills of men. Based on similar parallels, the Austro-Marxist Max Adler claimed Vico as the father of scientific sociology, which in his eyes was the essence of Marxism.4 For others, such as Georges Sorel,5 who ultimately abandoned Marxism for Vico’s notion of historical corsi and recorsi, Vico was understood as the anticipator of Marx’s contention that ideas were the epiphenomena of material forces embodied in the mode of production. Still other commentators6 found parallels in Vico’s sensitivity to class struggle in history; or his general originality in valuing historical thinking in an era when it was almost universally disparaged; or his recognition that discrete historical epochs should be understood as coherently integrated totalities; or his critique of the individualist premises of social contract theory; or his contention that cultural products, such as the Homeric epics, were collective creations; or his equation of the human essence with the ensemble of social relations; and so on.
