The Urban Origins of Moden Social Theory
Lecture and book presentation
Barbara Naddeo’s Vico and Naples provides an intellectual portrait of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) that reveals the politics and motivations of one of Europe’s first scientists of society, or philosophers of social justice. Rich with period detail and attentive to Vico’s historical, rhetorical, and jurisprudential texts, thiswork provides a compelling and vivid reconstruction of Vico’s life and times and of the origins of his powerful notion of the social. . Contrary to the conventional wisdom that Vico was a solitary figure, Naddeo recovers a Vico who was keenly attuned to the social changes challenging the political culture and exclusions of his native city and shows that his experiences of civic crises shaped his inquiry into the development of human society and the rights of its members.
In Naddeo’s pages, Vico comes alive as a prescient observer of Europe’s burgeoning metropolises and an advocate for new metropolitan groups. Vico and Naples is the winner of Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History (2012).
Barbara Naddeo is currently teaching History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Naddeo specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Europe, especially Italy. In particular, she is interested in the advent of the metropolis and its significance for the social sciences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As her case study, Dr. Naddeo has taken the capital city of Naples, which was the single largest metropolitan community in Europe around 1600 and a laboratory of the human sciences throughout the early modern period. Presently, she is preparing for publication a book manuscript, titled Birth of a Metropolis: The Open City and the Social Sciences in Naples, 1650–1800, and she is completing the research for an allied project on the political career of an early theorist of the metropolitan question, titled State Secrets for the Public Sphere: Giuseppe Maria Galanti, the Demand for Political Accountability and the Emergence of Statistics in Enlightenment Italy.