Vico, Hegel, and the Making of Modern Italy

Using a transnational approach to the intellectual history of 19th-century Italy, this book examines the highly idiosyncratic juxtaposition and amalgamation of local and foreign philosophical traditions, chiefly represented by the thought of Giambattista Vico and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Alessandro De Arcangelis convincingly argues the decisive role this played in shaping a historical mindset able to direct, and give legitimacy to, Italians' experiences of political change. By adopting a distinctly revisionist perspective, Arcangelis contends that, contrary to most scholarly verdicts on these exchanges, Italian thinkers did not view foreign ideas as models to imitate, or passively apply to the Italian political context. Instead, they maintained a highly critical attitude, which encouraged them to question what they were learning from their reception of foreign sources, critique their conceptual foundations, and grow suspicious of their applicability to the historical and political circumstances of the peninsula. Vico, Hegel, and the Making of Modern Italy reveals that it is not through the local assimilation of foreign ideas, but via an undefeated allegiance to the indigenous tradition of thought, exemplified by Vico's philosophy of history and the wider political tradition of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, that Italian authors sought to regenerate their culture, and respond to the local, national, and transnational political questions of the day. The book details how ways of thinking philosophically empowered Italian intellectuals to work through the uncertainties, drama, and energy of profound and unprecedented shifts in their experience of historical time. It tells a story that functions, above all, as an instructive and timely a reminder of the genuine and tangible significance of philosophical knowledge in Italian history, and its exceptional ability to chart the country's political destiny.