(iPoster) Vico’s Expulsion of the Poets

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 2 (Historical) & Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 2 (Historical)

Abstract

In Giambattista Vico’s theory of history, the form of political order in a given time and place depends on background cultural and cognitive conditions. Vico is often read (notably in Isaiah Berlin’s influential interpretation) as a cultural relativist and a critic of Enlightenment optimism about the power and progress of reason. In this paper, I develop an alternative interpretation of Vico as a political rationalist by bringing to light his profound but largely concealed debt to Plato’s theory of political culture in the Republic. Reading Vico through this Platonic lens, I argue that he believes a politics dominated by abstract, rational thought and discourse is normatively superior to the mythopoetic political orders of earlier ages: it is more just, more equitable, and more humane. Like Plato, who called for the expulsion of the poets from the just city, Vico thinks that the dominance of imagistic and poetic communication in a society threatens these fundamental political goods. Unlike Plato, however, Vico regards his system of political values as friendly to democracy, or at least popular government that tends in the direction of democracy. Vico thus applies Platonic arguments about the political dangers of imagistic and poetic communication to the defense of the decidedly un-Platonic ideal of popular government. I conclude by bringing out some troubling implications of this Platonic-Vichian theory for our own increasingly imagistic democracy.

Author

• Malloy Thomas Owen, Stanford University