A Counter-Enlightenment?

When the roots of Romanticism are traced to the age of Enlightenment, they are often located in the hinterland of Europe, where, at the margins of civilisation, solitary thinkers like Vico in Naples, Rousseau in Neuchâtel, or Herder in Lithuania are portrayed as having cast themselves adrift from the prevailing intellectual currents of their day. In opposing the idea of progress such proponents of what in the late nineteenth century came to be termed the Counter-Enlightenment are alleged to have subscribed to diverse notions of primitivism, preferring ancient mythology over modern science, popular intuitions over abstract ideas, and uncouth human nature over the refinements of culture. In confronting Enlightenment philosophy they are taken to have undermined its most central premises and subverted its aims in the manner of prophets harking back to a world we have lost, betrothed to fictitious ideals of uncultivated simplicity which, while derided by their contemporaries, have made their doctrines seem peculiarly post-modern and thereby apposite to a post-Enlightenment world.

Such perspectives, however, do grave injustice to the careers of Vico, Rousseau, Herder, and their disciples. When he put forward his now-celebrated notion of ‘ricorso’ – that is, of ‘repetition’ or ‘return’ – in just the last of his three formulations of a New Science of the laws of development of human society (Scienza nuova, 1725, 1730, and 1744), Vico was not advocating mankind’s reversion to a state of barbarism. As the Italian scholar Giuseppe Giarrizzo remarked, Vico’s political science was actually conceived ‘to save mankind from the return of barbarism’ (Giarrizzo 1981, p. 21).