Written in sand: A history of Fraser Island Book

3.5 stars. This is a good, if long-winded book on two interesting & important thinkers. Berlin appears to have read everything by his subjects, everything they influenced, everything that influenced them, and everything contemporaneous with them. IMO, not all of that detail needs to be there. A shade too scholarly. To give you an idea, the book literally ends on a paragraph-long footnote. Berlin belabors his points, and his paragraphs run on for pages. For all that, it's not too tedious, occasionally even lyrical.

Having just read Vico's New Science, I found the section on Herder more interesting. Berlin is more concerned with Vico's influence and place in intellectual history than in presenting a reading of Vico's work. For that, I recommend Hayden White's insightful essay on Vico in Tropics of Discourse.

Berlin is not very interested in Vico's cyclical model of history, which he thinks unoriginal. Of course in broad strokes, it isn't. It fits an archetypal Aryan model you can find among the Greeks and Hindus. But Vico's presentation is highly original, as White shows. First, Vico presents the stages of history not as imposed by some mysterious external cosmic force, but as a natural internal development of human society. Second, each stage is associated with a transformation in language rooted in a particular rhetorical trope (from metaphor to metonymy to synecdoche to irony). Third, Vico actually has two models: the cyclical one which is characteristic of pagan society, and the linear, providential one of Jews and Christians. The latter theory predominates in Western modernity, suggested by the Bible but influentially formulated by Joachim of Fiore, then by Hegel, then Marx. The former lives on in Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.