History Bump

Croce believed in the truth of ricorsi, but contended that “the theory only describes what happens generally in all societies; it neither prescribes what must happen at particular times and places nor predicts the outcome of a particular trend” (224). Croce viewed Vico’s law of ricorsi as Vico conflating the philosophical and empirical classes of inquiry (222, 223).

Croce explains the problem with conflating of these two classes is that “history is an art rather than a science” (219). In his earlier works, Croce believed that history “dealt with the individual, the empirical, and the transitory” while “science dealt with ‘the universal, the necessary, and the essential’” (221). Laws were thus out of the question for Croce’s conception of history, which “had to be kept free from the scientist’s impulse to see its objects as occupying a field of causally determined relationships…and the metaphysician’s inclination to regard those objects as functions of transcendental or immanent spiritual processes” (221-22). Later, Croce modifies his stance on history and on Vico’s work; he embraces the historical class of inquiry in addition to the philosophical and the empirical, but for Croce, the concepts of society and culture are products of the spirit and fall under the philosophical class of inquiry (226).

White notes two objections that Croce prepares for in his reading of Vico. Croce dismisses one objection, that “since the law really deals with the corso of the spirit and not of society or culture, no amount of empirical evidence can serve to challenge it,” by claiming that “one exception is enough to disconfirm” the universality of Vico’s “law” (225). This claim reverts to Positivist tendencies that Croce had earlier rejected, specifically, what Croce saw as the “fictions or psuedoconcepts” of “the laws of physical science” (225). White is more concerned with the other objection: Vico did account for exceptions in his “law,” which White sees as more of a theory, “a set of laws the utility of which, for predictive purposes, requires specification of the limiting conditions within which those laws apply” (227). White’s ultimate analysis is that “what Croce objected to was any kind of socioscientific procedure, for by his lights it represented an effort to treat a product of ‘free’ spirit as something causally determined” (227). In the end, it is Croce’s belief the historian’s be restricted to “representing and narrating” that leads to his objections to Vico (Croce qtd. in White 227).