ABSTRACT
There is a great deal worth admiring in Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Born to a bookseller in Naples, this philosopher-rhetorician produced ideas so advanced that centuries later they can be comfortably incorporated into postpsychology. It is true that politically he was conservative and that his philosophical outlook was heavily marked by idealism. In this chapter, the author addresses the intellectual paucity in vast swathes of social science writing, which he believe to be related to a lack of political imagination. Critical psychology is deeply suspicious of ‘common sense’, and rightly so. Most of the time, common sense is merely the reactionary weight of dead tradition or introjected bourgeois ideas normalised through repetition and lack of a counter-argument. Michael Billig studied commonsensical, everyday understandings of the British monarchy and showed its dilemmatic ideological character. Reasoning is human; rationalism an ideology with limitations. Empirical sensing makes us who we are; empiricism entraps us within a naive form of psychological thinking.
