Giambattista Vico and the History of Historical Empathy

Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) has been accurately identified as one of the first western philosophers to argue that people in different eras thought differently, and to grapple seriously with the implications of this for the writing of history. The difficulties inherent in this endeavour themselves explain why Vico has been repeatedly ‘rediscovered’ by later historians, who have refashioned his ideas in strikingly different ways. This article takes as its point of departure the idea of ‘historical empathy’, which has been widely associated with Vico (most influentially by Isaiah Berlin). Close attention to Vico’s use in his New Science of the concepts of making, imagining and understanding reveals the considerable distance between his historical thinking and the modern notion of empathy. Later ‘discoverers’ of Vico – most notably Jules Michelet and Benedetto Croce – freely adapted Vico’s ideas in forming their own distinctive conceptions of what we might today consider as historical empathy. The method of ‘conceptual triangulation’ used in this essay yields sharpened perspectives on multiple fronts: on the approaches to historical empathy of Vico, Michelet and Croce; on the similarities and differences in the ways in which later interpreters have made use of Vico; and on the malleability, possibilities and problematics of the idea of empathy itself.