Universal Right: Giambattista Vico

This translation will undoubtedly constitute a landmark in Vico studies in view of the way in which they have developed over the last half-century. A striking feature of this development is its concentration on Vico later works, i.e. the various versions of the New Science, and to some extent his earlier work, particularly its implications for educational theory, to the almost complete exclusion of the mass of philosophical and juridical work that he published between 1720 and 1722, namely the Synopsis of Universal Right, The One Principle End and the One End of Universal Right, The Constancy of the Jurist, and the two sets of Notes and Dissertations. There are two obvious reasons for this omission. One is the sheer complexity and difficulty of the texts themselves. The other is that, given the eclectic nature of Vico's sources, an appreciation of his doctrines requires a knowledge of the theological, jurisprudential and poetic context which many historians and philosophers simply lack. As a result the enormous body of work contained in this translation has largely been by-passed as a staging post in Vico's journey to the theories of the New Science rather than being considered as something worthy of study in its own right. This is highly regrettable because, although it is unarguable that many of Vico's later doctrines are pre-figured in Universal Right, they also appear there in ways so significantly different as to raise serious questions of interpretation and critical evaluation. For example, although the theory of poetic characters appears in Universal Right, it is not there accompanied by any mention of the imaginative universal which features so prominently in the New Science and which, at one point in it, to the confusion of many commentators, is identified with a poetic character. This must raise the question whether the identification was a further development of the theory or simply a mistake. Again, Universal Law is markedly more rationalist than the New Science, which is often interpreted as a completely anti-rationalist work. Thus where, in Universal Right, Vico attempts to deduce the legitimacy of various social and political functions from God, in the editions of the New Science, he supports them by an appeal to the nature of the human mind. This difference must raise questions about the ways in which Vico's metaphysical thought changed, the extent to which it changed and, of course, whether it ought to have changed in those ways. But apart from these and many other questions internal to understanding Vico's thought that attention to Universal Right raises, there is a further and quite different reason why it ought not to suffer from its current neglect: that it is by far the most important contribution he made to jurisprudential thought as such. Though this contribution was studied in the nineteenth century, it has yet to be studied in the context of modern research into legal theory. Such research will not merely provide a re-assessment of Vico's contribution to jurisprudential theory but, reciprocally, that of the jurisprudential theory of his time.

This long-awaited first English translation of Universal Right provides, therefore, an invaluable opportunity to begin upon a rethinking both of many features of current Vico research as well as the history of jurisprudence. The translations themselves are extremely literal and, if this makes them slightly awkward at times, it also makes them very accurate. Given the difficulties of the text, this alone constitutes a major achievement. In addition to the main works cited above, however, the volume contains a mass of supplementary contextual material. This includes translations of helpful letters, summaries of older-now difficult to obtain-Italian commentaries on some of Vico's jurisprudential doctrines, and of such modern discussions as exist, and a truly enormous amount of scholarly material and notes on Vico's sources, the nature of distinctions drawn in the juridical context within which he was working and, to some extent, the nature of his own thought. Amounting, in effect, to a comprehensive commentary on this whole work, to which there is nothing remotely comparable elsewhere, this material, supported by an outstandingly comprehensive analytic index, cannot fail to be of enormous assistance to scholars interested in any of the above-mentioned fields of research.

The whole publication thus represents a huge achievement for which its authors are to be congratulated. Although its price may prove prohibitive for some individual scholars, no library which aims to support research into Vico or into the history of eighteenth-century jurisprudential thought in general can afford not to possess a copy of it.