Vichian Rhetoric and Contemporary Science, an Old New Path for Political Theory

From 1900 to 1927, there was a scientific revolution which broke the classical model and its postulates on truth and objectivity. The pattern for everything–science, the state, and society, our deepest assumptions about space and time, the world in general, matter and causality, from the separation between subject and object to determinism–was swept away by what, somewhat ironically, came to be known as the modern model. However, the new paradigm encountered enormous difficulties to go beyond the sphere of physics, including going to political theory. The opportunity it provided to revisit key elements of the first modern wave, glistening with humanist rhetoric, through a broad cosmovision that included political and philosophical spheres, languished for decades. Today, when interdisciplinarity urges us to adopt the current scientific paradigm in all sciences to better face the challenges of our times, we can return to the works of Giambattista Vico who, from the very beginning of Modernity, defended an integrating path for science. In this paper I will explore the possible relations between Vico’s proposal and the principles of the new science that emerged from the 20th century scientific revolution. From the rhetorical notion of verisimilitude, ars topica, and loyalty to the experiment, from the importance given to phantasy, contingency, and metaphor, Vichian rhetoric provides a sensibility capable of recognising the riches and limitations of the human in our scientific task of understanding reality. In addition to the basic contemporary perspective, I am primarily guided in this task by the later reflections of Erwin Schrödinger, the pioneering scientist who seems closest to Vico, and by the retrospective philosophical work of Werner Heisenberg in the 1950s. From this endeavour a political theory will emerge that, quite unlike the heirs of Ramism and the Cartesian method, is capable of being consistent with the current scientific paradigm and is still able to pursue a science based on common sense, understanding, tacit knowledge, and vision, as much of contemporary political theorists has been asking for since the mid-twentieth century in their dialogue with empirical political scientists.