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.

• 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.