Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 297 quieu's Lettres persanes--a book which appears mild in this context compared to the radical critique of Marana--and of Voltaire's Lettres philosophiques, in which literary techniques such as irony, wit, and humor replace the direct critique of the early deist manuscripts. Against the backdrop of the early deists, Montesquieu's and Voltaire's originality is in their evaluation of religion by social utility and in their literary effectiveness. The impact of Betts' book I expect will be to draw more scholars into a fresh reading of the biting clandestine treatises of the so-called "precursors" and "early deists," which I might add are also of interest in putting Hume in historical perspective. Early Deism in France is very useful to students and scholars in its vivid paraphrasing of the viewpoints of the imaginary deists whose rejection of Christianity is portrayed through dialogues with Christians. A major oversight, however, is Betts' omission of any mention of More's Utopia (1516) which established the genre of a faraway land inhabited by believers in a simple natural religion (rather than Foigny as Betts asserts). Fictional deists discussed include Senamus and Toralba in Bodin's Colloquium Heptaplomeres, Suains in Foigny's La terre australe connue, the S~varambe people in Veiras' Histoire des S~vambes, the Spy in Marana's Espion turc, the Avaite in Gilbert's Histoire de Calejava. Gilbert's work of x7oo marks the new century with its traveller Alatre rejecting Christianity in favor of the deist religion. Further deist figures include Adario, the Canadian Indian Chief in Lahontan's or Gueudeville's Dialogues curieux, the first deist figure whose views were properly labelled "d6istes" by contemporary critics, and in Tyssot de Patot's Voyages et avantures deJaques Massot the Austral judge and priest, the Chinese in Goa, and the Gascon renegade. The Persians of Montesquieu and the Quakers of Voltaire are thus placed in the context of this genre. Scholars who have enjoyed Hazard's La crise de la conscience europ~enne (x68oI7z5 ) will without doubt be interested in Betts' work. It is a careful rethinking of an important philosophical strand in the de-Christianization of Western culture. There is a Table of Contents, Bibliography, and Index. The appendix "The Attribution of the Difficult~s sur la religion to Robert Challe" disputes that claim made by F.-L. Mars, F. Deloffre, and M. Menemencioglu. While the edition is of high quality, typographical errors do crop up in clusters, for example on pages 96-97 and on page 159. MARYANNE CLINE HOROWITZ Occidental College Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Editor. Vico and Marx: Affinities and Contrasts. Atlantic Highlands : Humanities Press, x983. Pp.ix + 438. $34.95 Giambattista Vico remains an enigmatic and controversial figure in the history of thought, capable of exciting rather than satisfying the students of history and society. He was, as Sir Isaiah Berlin has put it, a man with not enough talent for his genius. His thought was too complex, his prose too labored, his arrangement too unsys- a98 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 25:2 APRIL ~987 tematic and many of his ideas too original to win him immediate recognition or to make him the founder of a coherent and flourishing school. It took almost one hundred years for his genius and especially for his modernity to be recognised; it has taken more than two hundred for scholars to appreciate the range and complexity of his thought reasonably fully, to set him in the context of Italian humanism and yet to recognise how far he goes beyond it. English-speaking readers were introduced to Vico in a general way only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through Flint's Vico, translations of Croce and occasional admiring but slight references by Marxists such as Trotsky. They emerged with a Vico who presaged many of the intellectual discoveries or fashions of the nineteenth century: with his belief in development, historicity, and laws that govern social change; his treatment of providence in a manner analogous to Hegel's cunning of reason; his emphasis on class struggles in antiquity; his recognition that law is not imposed on society from outside but arises out of...