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Horst Steinke
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To begin with an overall description, it is expressed succinctly
by Mazzotta:
Within the narrative economy of Book V the account of the
ricorso
symmetrically reenacts and mirrors the general design of the whole of
the
New Science
. […] Book V starts with the theological age of the new
Christian history; it goes through the heroic medieval times, and it
ends with the modern age and the role of the
New Science
in Vico’s own
times
30
.
However, the chapter in the middle (§§ 1057-1087), by far the
longest of the three chapters, does not deal with cultural oscilla-
tions in their highest generality as the ages of “gods”, “heroes”,
and “men”, as one would expect, but, firstly, more narrowly with
juridical subjects, and secondly, within this already circumscribed
scope, an even more restricted legal domain, the law governing
Roman “clientes”
vs
. medieval feudal law
31
. This recognition draws
us immediately into the recurrent themes of
Scienza nuova
, the
history of Rome and the history of law and the rule of law, both
on their own, and as inextricably intertwined. As is well known,
Vico was not interested in Roman history for its own sake, but
because he saw in it an actual historical instantiation of his phi-
losophy of history
32
. This is not the full story, however, behind
the pervasive presence of Rome, its body of law, its forms of
governance, in every one of the “books” that make up
Scienza
nuova.
It was Vico’s reflections on law, not in its positivistic sense,
to begin with, but rather in its reflection of equity and justice
33
,
that in the first place led him to the need to unearth its origins in
remote times, and with these sources of law, concomitantly the
sources of civilization itself in its fundamental structures and
achievements
34
. Or, as has been put even more pointedly:
El Derecho como expresión de la naturaleza humana, es uno de los
más elaborados [puntos], sin duda por los profundos y profusos
conocimientos que el italiano tenía del Derecho (
Law as an expression of