Wilson 1940

Edmund Wilson. To the Finland Station: a Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Pub. 1940. Repr. New York Review Books Classics, 2003.

• Useful as a gloss for Freedgood's connection of Vico to Marx
• 5: Though Vico had lived and written a hundred years before [Michelet in 1824], he had never been translated into French and was in fact little known outside Italy.
• Vico had read Francis Bacon, and had decided that it ought to be possible to apply to the study of human history methods similar to those proposed by Bacon for the study of the natural world.
• 7: And [from Principles of a New Science Dealing with the Nature of Nations {1725)]: "In that dark night which shrouds from our eyes the most remote antiquity, a light appears which cannot lead us astray; I speak of this incontestable truth: the social world is certainly the work of men; and it follows that one can and should find its principles in the modifications of human intelligence itself.
• 161: We were concerned in the first sections of this study with wirters who were attempting retrospectively to dominate the confusion of history by imposing on it the harmony of art, who participated in the affairs of the present at most only through polemical lectures like Michelet (whose suspension frmo the College de France elicited from Engels only the comment that it would combine with his bourgeois ideas to promote the popularity of his history).... With Marx and Engls we come to men of equal genius who are trying to make the historical imagination intervene in human affairs as a direct constructive force.
• 459ff: Two hundred years before, Giambattista Vico, at his books in a far corner of Europe the whole width of the continent away, in asserting that "the social world" was "certainly the work of man," had refrained from going further and declaring, as Grotius had done, that the social institutions of men could be explained in terms of man alone.... In the Catholic city of Naples, in the shadow of the Inquisition, Vico had to keep God in his system. [...] [460] Lenin in 1917, with a remnant of Vico's God still disguised in the Dialectic, but with no fear of Roman Pope or Protestant Synod, not so sure of the controls of society as the engineer was of the egine that was taking him to Petrograd, yet in a position to calculate the chances with closer accuracy than a hundred to one, stood on the eve of the moment when for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock.