Many great minds of the modern world, from Karl Marx to James Joyce,
have claimed Giambattista Vico as an intellectual forefather.
But Mark Lilla finds that these admirers usually misread the arguments
of the West's first antimodernist.

iambattista Vico was born in Naples in 1668and died there in 1744.The son of a modest book- seller, he received an unconven- tional education, tutoring himself in his father's shop between short and difficult pe- riods in Jesuit schools. At the age...