Volume 15, 2018
Human Rights
Renate Holub
Pages 35-40
Vico in the 21st Century
Towards Global Justice?
Gramsci has been regarded as one of the most important critical intellectuals in the 20th century, and Vico as one of the most important philosophers of Italy. In this paper, I introduce Gramsci’s critical reflections on Vico, because they have not widely circulated. In these reflections, Gramsci remained profoundly unimpressed by Vico’s philosophy. He arrived at this conclusion by comparing ‘progressive’ intellectual traditions in France, Germany, and Britain while noting that in Italy a tradition comparable to those in Britain [political economists], France [enlightenment philosophers] and Germany [philosophy of history] was absent. I argue in this paper that Gramsci’s rejection of Vico offers an opportunity to rethink the relations between ‘national political theory’ and ‘international political theory’: for what Vico offered at the beginning of ‘modernity’ is a blueprint of the principle of the right to violence-less-ness not only in ‘national political theory,’ but also in ‘international relations theory.’ In other words, while predominant ‘modern political philosophers’ in the English, French, and German traditions promoted the right to violence-less-ness in ‘national law,’ in international law and international relations theory they maintained a principle of violence. To this day predominant international theories disregard the right to violence-less-ness by adhering to the principle and the facts of ‘just war theory.’ Vico had begun a discourse over three hundred years ago which had been by-passed by the prestige and influence of transatlantic political theories framed in the category of the ‘national.’ However, over the past decade or so, theories and institutions of global justice have emerged which attest to the prescience of Vico’s contributions to the evolution of a concept of human rights to violence-less-ness beyond national borders.