I

Between 1650 and 1800 the scope of political thought widened dramatically. Until then, the concerns of political thinkers had clustered more or less closely around the subject of the state. Central topics of political enquiry were the nature of legitimate authority, the origins and subject-matter of justice, the location of supreme or sovereign power, the existence and extent of a right of resistance, the scope of reason of state. In the mid-seventeenth century, all these were explored in the works of Thomas Hobbes, who made the securing of peace his priority, and a concept of the state the focus of his response. The traditional concerns did not suddenly disappear from political enquiry after 1650; but they were revised and re-cast as political thinkers turned increasingly to address the implications of geographical diversity, of social hierarchies, and of the growing competition for economic resources. The new interests may be explained as responses to major developments in the European political order: the end of religious wars, consolidation of a more stable states system at the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, increased contact with non-European political systems, and the growing political importance of commercial interests. But extending the scope of political thought was not simply a matter of adding to the topics of enquiry. The underlying conceptual framework of political thought also altered and expanded, making it possible to extend the scope of the political. To explain how this occurred, we need to identify the questions, new or re-formulated, which enabled and even entailed this transformation of the field of enquiry. One such transformative question, I wish to argue, was that of sociability: how men and women came to form enduring, stable societies.

Viewed from the period before 1650, the persistence, or recurrence, of the problem of sociability may present a puzzle. It was certainly not a new problem. Annabel Brett has reminded us that sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Aristotelians, both Humanist and Scholastic, treated their master's famous proposition that man is naturally political not as a given but as a premise to be clarified. Where the boundaries of the civitas, the city, were to be drawn and how its membership should be determined were open questions: civil society could not be taken for granted. If anything, Catholic Scholastics, exercised by the problem of the will, were less confident of human sociability than Protestants, for whom justice ad alterum was a key tenet of natural law.Footnote ¹ But the Protestant Grotius was also aware that the thesis of natural sociability needed reinforcement: it is this, Chris Brooke has argued, which explains his invocation of the Stoic concept of Oikeiosis.Footnote ² With the breakdown of the political order in England in the 1640s, a number of thinkers took these doubts still further, to the point of supposing that ungoverned man would naturally put self-preservation before sociability. The Epicurean thought that men were originally indistinguishable from beasts, reinforced in several cases by the Socinian thesis that Christ had taught man a new moral law, encouraged the reduction of man's natural moral attributes to a minimal set of natural rights, whose surrender in return for subordination to political authority would secure peace.Footnote ³

But the starkest formulation of the problem was that of Hobbes, who in the second paragraph of his major Latin work of political thought De cive (1642, 1647) dismissed as ‘false’ Aristotle's axiom that man is born fit for society.Footnote ⁴ In Leviathan (1651) the crucial discussion comes later, in Chapter 13, on ‘the natural condition of mankind’.Footnote ⁵ Several features of Hobbes's argument may be underlined. At issue was the natural condition of mankind, not the state of nature in general: even if a mechanistic account of all nature as matter in motion applied equally to men and beasts, the problem of sociability was formulated only with reference to humans.Footnote ⁶ The problem, moreover, was not confined to the desire for self-preservation, for there were three causes of quarrel between men: competition, diffidence, and glory. Hobbes illustrated the working of these causes by examples both historical and contemporary. These suggest that Hobbes envisaged some forms of social interaction as occurring in the natural condition of mankind, including family life, exchange of goods, and opportunities for men to distinguish themselves one from another. Although they are unmentioned, sources for Hobbes's illustrations of primitive human behaviour might be found in Lucretius and Diodorus Siculus.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, the chapter on the natural condition of man was preceded by one on religion, where Hobbes had characterized men, unlike beasts, as naturally religious, out of a fear of invisible powers and ignorance of the causes of visible effects. In their fear, he added, men naturally worship gods with the same expressions of reverence as they show towards men, an observation which seems to confirm that religion naturally has a social aspect.Footnote ⁸ That there was more to Hobbes's account of unsociability than simple self-preservation, that several forms of unsociability are displayed in social contexts, does not, however, compromise their naturalness. Hobbes was insistent that the natural condition of mankind was a conceptual not a historical conjecture, depicting individual human beings to whom could be attributed certain natural rights, and of whom could be expected an intention to adhere to the minimum requirements of the Law of Nature. This conjecture Hobbes presented as the only coherent basis on which to understand how sociability could be secured by the institution of (or submission to) an authorized, representative sovereign power.

Hobbes had formulated the problem of man's natural unsociability so starkly the better to offer his new and apparently definitive solution – his theory of sovereign power and the state. As Quentin Skinner has argued in a series of studies, the theory of the state as a fictional ‘person’, represented by the sovereign power acting on its behalf, can be regarded as Hobbes's crowning achievement.Footnote ⁹ Skinner emphasizes the modernity of this conception of the state; this may be so, but it should also be observed that Hobbes himself showed more concern to demonstrate its compatibility with the existing evidence of the Bible and the history of the church. He devoted the final chapters of De cive to arguing that the authority of the civil sovereign was not compromised under either the Old or the New Covenants – and then recast the argument in Part iii of Leviathan, to insist that doubts about the canon of scripture re-inforced the need for authority in all matters religious as well as civil to lie with the civil sovereign.Footnote ¹⁰

Yet, for all its ingenuity, its suggested modernity, even its demonstrated compatibility with sacred history, Hobbes's theory of the state did not persuade his contemporaries and immediate successors that the problem of man's natural unsociability had been solved. The conceptual sophistication of Hobbes's theory of the state was quickly grasped by Pufendorf, and appreciated by a number of his followers.Footnote ¹¹ It attracted the attention of Montesquieu and, more profoundly, of Rousseau. But it was not generally accepted, least of all as a solution to the problem of sociability. There were many reasons for rejecting Hobbes's conception of the state. It defied powerful, long-established understandings of political liberty.Footnote ¹² It was excessively abstract, offering no account of where the sovereign would find the armies required to maintain its power of the sword.Footnote ¹³ It lacked the flexibility offered by the ancient account of the forms of government, which made it possible to relate the distribution of political authority to the distribution of ranks and values within historically given societies. Above all, it was too drastic in its Erastianism, a vulnerability only enhanced by Hobbes's radically heterodox treatment of sacred history.Footnote ¹⁴ Even when the criticism was misguided, it was corrosive; by the eighteenth century, interest in Hobbes's theory of the state was the exception, not the norm.

By contrast, there was no such decline in interest in the problem of sociability. If anything, the problem only became more prominent. That it was widely associated with Hobbes, however, did not mean that his particular formulation of it was generally accepted. Directly or indirectly, reference continued to be made to the classical sources for its discussion, Lucretius, Diodorus Siculus, and Cicero. To these were added their Renaissance popularizers, and the observers and historians of the newly discovered peoples of the Indies and the Americas.Footnote ¹⁵ Together, these sources gave several reasons to believe that the problem of sociability was less straightforward than Hobbes's reductive formulation suggested. Although Hobbes had considered family relations and, more fully, men's natural propensity for religion, there was much more to be said under both heads. For all the importance of language to his political theory, Hobbes had neglected its history. Likewise, he may have been aware that men's economic rivalry extended far beyond goods of subsistence, but he had paid too little attention to its consequences, not least for relations between sovereign states.Footnote ¹⁶ In short, not only was Hobbes's solution to the problem of sociability open to objection; the problem itself was more complex – and more interesting – than his deliberately conceptual, unhistorical presentation of it had allowed. Hobbes dramatized the issue, but after him the debate over it intensified and ramified.

The preoccupation with sociability in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is now the subject of growing scholarly attention. A key early contributor to the discussion, Istvan Hont and T. J. Hochstrasser have argued, was Samuel Pufendorf. It was explicitly in response to the second paragraph of De cive that Pufendorf framed his fundamental law of nature, that every man ought to preserve and promote a peaceful ‘sociableness’ with others (socialitas, sociabilité).Footnote ¹⁷ The subsequent use of Pufendorf's texts in the teaching of natural law in Protestant universities ensured that the issue remained central to this tradition well into the eighteenth century. Versions of natural sociability continued to be strenuously defended, by Christian Thomasius in Germany and Frances Hutcheson in Scotland.Footnote ¹⁸ But the problem could not be contained in the way that Hutcheson hoped, becoming instead foundational to wider discussion of the nature and working of commercial society. In the Fable of the bees Mandeville demonstrated that the polite sociability of the modern city was anything but natural, being the fruit of the infinite human capacity for artifice.Footnote ¹⁹ Although anxious to avoid the one-sidedness of the Hobbesian and Mandevillian conceptions of natural unsociability, David Hume conceded that the justice required to secure society was not of natural institution.Footnote ²⁰ Rousseau complicated the discussion still further. His contrast of the natural self-sufficiency of the savage with the self-deceiving artifice of civilized man provoked responses across Europe, not least from Adam Smith; equally provocative was his remark that it was impossible to tell which had come first, language or society.Footnote ²¹ The problem was still exercising Kant in the 1780s, when he gave it its definitive formulation as the problem of ‘unsocial sociability’.Footnote ²² By then, it had permeated discussion of topics as diverse as the origins of language, political economy, and possibility of establishing an international political order.Footnote ²³ No serious political philosopher of the eighteenth century, it seems, could afford to take sociability for granted.

There is, however, a feature of this story which has been insufficiently noticed: all the thinkers mentioned above were Protestants, or from Protestant intellectual contexts. We clearly should not assume that Catholic thinkers were uninterested in the problem of sociability. The example of Pascal, Nicole, and other Augustinians is evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, between the Protestant and the Catholic intellectual worlds of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries there was one difference which might explain why Catholic thinkers have seemed less attuned to the problem of sociability.

As we have just seen, in Protestant contexts the problem continued to be addressed through the study of natural law. Many even of those without pedagogic obligations, such as Hume and Rousseau, framed their discussions of sociability in ways which were more or less related to the discourse of natural jurisprudence. We might expect the same to have been the case on the Catholic side. Not only were the conditions of sociability a long-standing preoccupation of Catholic jurists; many of their preoccupations had been picked up by Hobbes.Footnote ²⁴ Yet, that discussion does not appear to have taken place. Why Catholic scholastic natural law, still so vibrant in the first half of the seventeenth century, should have lost its way after 1650 is a question which has not (to my knowledge) been addressed by historians of political thought. Perhaps it did not, and we do not yet know enough to appreciate its survival.Footnote ²⁵ But at least two plausible reasons for a loss of confidence among Catholic natural lawyers can be identified.

One was the revival within Catholicism of a rigorist version of Augustinianism, spearheaded by Pascal. On the Augustinian understanding of the human condition after the Fall, re-stated in the sixteenth century by Baius and Jansenius, scholastic natural law could yield a dangerously presumptuous estimate of men and women's moral capacity. Yet, the later Scholastics, Suarez above all, had actually enlarged the scope of natural morality by their introduction of the concept of a state of ‘pure nature’, distinct from fallen nature and thus hypothetically independent of grace.Footnote ²⁶ In response, Pascal and the Augustinians of Port-Royal insisted that only the gift of grace could compensate for natural human concupiscence. In so far as men and women had achieved a measure of sociability, the Port-Royal Augustinians argued, it was the unintended outcome of their self-interest, as they deceived each other into satisfying their mutual needs.

A second source of pressure on Catholic natural law was the mounting controversy over the Chinese rites. To sustain their mission to China, the Jesuits insisted on interpreting Confucianism as a benign form of natural religion, whose rites were purely civil, and whose adherents could be expected shortly to convert to Christianity.Footnote ²⁷ To their critics among the other missionary orders, such confidence in a seamless progression from nature to grace defied all theological credibility.Footnote ²⁸ In this context of Augustinian moral rigorism and the Jesuits’ excessive naturalism, the intellectual viability of natural law may well have been compromised.

I want to suggest, however, that Catholic philosophers had an alternative resource on which to draw: sacred history. Sacred history may be defined as the history of God's relations with his people, as recounted in the Old and New Testaments and other relevant texts, and later as embodied in the history of the Christian church. The Testaments themselves were of course the Word of God; even if the meaning of that appellation had become a matter of scholarly interpretation, scripture provided a defined textual basis for sacred history. But since God's relations with his peoples had continued after the Apostolic period, sacred history extended to include ecclesiastical history well beyond the Bible, and formed a distinct tradition in ancient and modern historiography.Footnote ²⁹ In what follows, my focus is limited to the sacred history recorded in the Old Testament, and primarily in the Pentateuch: I shall argue that as developments in textual scholarship complicated the sense in which the Old Testament was understood as the Word of God, its value as a historical source for study of the Hebrews and their ancient contemporaries was enhanced. An increasing ability to understand the content of the Bible historically made it possible to use its evidence to answer new questions. Prominent among these was the question of how humans became sociable. I shall contend that such an application of sacred history to the problem of sociability was the object, and the distinguishing achievement, of the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone and Giambattista Vico.

II

The second half of the seventeenth century was a period of radical upheaval in the study of sacred history. At the heart of the upheaval was biblical criticism, scholarship devoted to the Word of God in the strict sense. The destabilizing of accepted assumptions about the coherence of scripture can no longer be attributed simply to three mischief-makers: Hobbes, Isaac la Peyrère, and Benedict Spinoza. Hobbes was notorious for questioning in Leviathan whether Moses could have been the author of the Pentateuch. Similar notoriety attached to La Peyrère, for suggesting in a work published four years later that there must have been men and women in the world before Adam, and that the Flood had been a local event.Footnote ³⁰ Most provocative of all, Spinoza argued in his Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670) that the Hebrew Bible was indeed both late in its composition and particular in its focus, being compiled by the high priest Ezra to confirm the Hebrews’ obedience to the Mosaic Law after their Babylonian captivity.Footnote ³¹ As Noel Malcolm has pointed out, however, the three provocateurs took their cue from earlier work by professional scholars, both Jewish and Christian: they publicized, but did not cause, the upheaval already taking place in biblical scholarship.Footnote ³²

If the issues were long-standing, debate over them nevertheless intensified in the mid- and later seventeenth century. The protagonists came from both sides of the main confessional divide, and the lines of disagreement did not always follow those of confessional allegiance. In the mid-century, the Catholic Oratorian Jean Morin found common ground with the Protestant Louis Cappel in criticism of the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible. Readier to engage in controversy were Richard Simon, also a member of the Paris Oratory, and the Huguenot Jean Le Clerc; but here too there was common ground. In his great Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), Simon argued that its several books had been composed by public ‘scribes’ who worked under the direction of Moses and the Prophets, and thus on God's authority. The Old Testament, therefore, was both divinely inspired and founded on the historical record; but it was a composite text, and could not be expected to be entirely consistent, least of all in its chronologies.Footnote ³³ Le Clerc rejected the argument from the scribes, preferring to establish when and by whom the books of the Old Testament were written on the evidence of language and authorial purpose. Initially denying Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, he later changed his mind to allow that Moses had written the accounts of events before and during his life, but continued to deny that Moses was divinely inspired.Footnote ³⁴ Through the twists and turns of their controversy, however, common ground remained: Simon and Le Clerc were at one in treating the Bible as a historical construction, a full understanding of which depended on reading it in conjunction with other ancient histories.

Supplementing biblical criticism was a further wealth of new scholarship in ancillary fields. Central to such enquiry in the seventeenth century was chronology: the attempt to render the biblical chronologies consistent in themselves and compatible with the chronologies derived from other ancient peoples, including the Chinese. The difficulties involved had been thoroughly explored by the great early seventeenth-century Protestant scholar, Joseph Scaliger; later in the century they were further elaborated by the English gentleman-scholar, Sir John Marsham.Footnote ³⁵ Other scholars investigated the peoples and religions of the ancient Near and Middle East, the Assyrians or Chaldeans and the Egyptians. A critical question, explored by John Spencer, Master of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, was whether the Hebrews had taken their sacred rites from the Egyptians – and had as a result been tainted by their idolatry. Another question, raised by study of the Assyrians and their successors the Persians, concerned the possibility that their philosophers had belatedly supplied the Hebrews with the metaphysics necessary for the doctrine of the immortal soul.Footnote ³⁶

Almost all these scholars professed their theological orthodoxy. But given the importance of the scriptures to all the churches – to Protestants professing a sola Scriptura basis for their faith, to Catholics bound by the decrees of the Council of Trent affirming the authority of the Latin Vulgate – any scholarly enquiry concerned with the Bible was venturing onto contested ground. Heterodoxy in someone's eyes was almost impossible to avoid.Footnote ³⁷ It was here, moreover, that Hobbes and Spinoza did real damage: if not by the scholarly findings they appropriated, then in the conclusions they derived from these findings. Hobbes, as we have seen, exploited textual uncertainties as well as the history contained in the Testaments to argue that it was the civil sovereign who by divine right should determine the public content and practice of Christian belief.Footnote ³⁸ Spinoza's conclusions were still more insidious. The Hebrew Bible might be Ezra's compilation, but it and the Christian Bible were still the Word of God: as such, they taught ‘piety and obedience’, the first of these texts to the Hebrews alone, the second, potentially, to all peoples. The scriptures thus revealed the moral basis of human society, whose laws would then be enforced by a civil sovereign; but they did so on behalf of a God who was of the same substance as Nature, and inseparable from it.Footnote ³⁹ With such potential implications, it is not surprising that the intensifying scholarly discussion of the Bible and its historical setting attracted the attention of the guardians of orthodoxy, Protestant and Catholic. As we shall see in a moment, the authorities in Rome were particularly keen to set terms to the debate. But just as the scholarship was inter-confessional, so interest in it crossed confessional borders, and the debate was eagerly followed in at least parts of Catholic as well as Protestant Europe, nowhere more so than in Catholic Naples.

III

By 1700, Naples was the third city of Europe, after London and Paris, with a population of c. 300,000 – roughly the same level that in the sixteenth century had made it the largest city in Europe. A major intellectual and cultural centre in 1600, it was still that in 1700.Footnote ⁴⁰ It had all the requisites of intellectual activity, including printers, booksellers, two large libraries open to scholars, academies, and access to the review journals and correspondence networks of the European republic of letters. The image of Naples as an isolated backwater, fostered by Vico's self-pitying Autobiography, is simply not true.Footnote ⁴¹

Prominent among the interests of Neapolitan men of letters was sacred history. Their libraries were up-to-date in biblical criticism, chronology, and the religion and philosophy of the ancient world; works by Capel, Spinoza, Simon, Le Clerc, Marsham, Spencer were all available, alongside those of their many more orthodox critics.Footnote ⁴² A manuscript now held in the Girolamini Library, dating probably from the 1690s, attests to knowledge particularly of the recent debate between Simon and Le Clerc over the authorship of the Pentateuch: the issues are fully and calmly discussed, with the minimum necessary deference to the requirement to accept the authority of the church.Footnote ⁴³

Sacred history was likewise to the fore in the city's leading learned academy, the Medina Coeli (1698–1701), where the political and natural history, religion, and philosophy of the Assyrian and Persian empires and of the Hebrew Republic, from Moses to Herod, were the subject of courses of lectures. Vico was a member of this academy; though Giannone was too young to be elected to it, he later recalled the interest aroused by its activities.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition, Giannone was the pupil of the jurist Domenico Aulisio, from whom he learned to think historically about Roman Law, but who was also a scholar of sacred history, and the posthumous author of a work on the ‘sacred schools’. Since it was through these schools that the ancient Hebrews had preserved their history and the early Christians had constructed their theology, their study raised many of the critical questions facing sacred historians.Footnote ⁴⁵

Even so, there is no denying that a shadow hung over Neapolitan intellectual life – the shadow cast by Rome. It was not just that the papacy continued to assert its long-held claim to feudal over-lordship over the kingdom. It was even more vigilant of its ecclesiastical authority. A direct attempt by the archbishop and Inquisition to stifle the spread of the new ideas of Cartesianism and Epicureanism by putting several alleged ‘atheists’ on trial in the 1680s was defeated by an alliance of jurists and men of letters.Footnote ⁴⁶ But in the case of sacred history, Rome possessed more subtle ways of shaping the agenda of discussion.

Two institutions were responsible for the intellectual agenda of the Catholic church, the Congregations of the Holy Office (the Inquisition), reconstituted in 1542, and its younger, junior partner, the Index of Prohibited Books, whose independent existence dated from 1572. Particularly important to these was the integrity of the Bible, since the Council of Trent committed the church to using the Vulgate (St Jerome's Latin translation of the Hebrew Bible), and had strictly prohibited translations into the vernacular.Footnote ⁴⁷ The new biblical scholarship therefore caused considerable alarm. Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus was condemned on the instruction of the Holy Office in 1678; Simon's Histoire critique du Vieux Testament followed it on to the Index in 1682. The report which recommended the latter's prohibition noted that Simon had questioned the unique authenticity of the Vulgate as well as Moses’ sole authorship of the Pentateuch; the second error was compounded by the ‘temerity’ with which Simon expressed himself, ‘more Galilei’.Footnote ⁴⁸ The comparison was resonant: the reader would have the cardinals of the Index take as hard a line against the new biblical scholarship as their predecessors had taken against Copernicanism.

But it was not only by specific decisions that the Index influenced debate; as important was its modus operandi.Footnote ⁴⁹ Authors were not summoned in person; indeed, they were not supposed to know that proceedings were under way. Instead, the Index functioned as a continuous, secretive, and infinitely slow-moving exercise in peer review. Books brought to its notice were sent out to readers, the Index Consultores; months later (in some cases many months later) these reported back to the Congregation with their recommendations – to condemn, to condemn until corrected, or (very rarely) to take no further action. Books which cardinals wished to spare, they sent out for yet more readings. It was a system not so much punitive, though it could be, especially when the Holy Office became involved, as a permanent force for intellectual inertia.

The pressure which this system exerted was cumulative. Before writing their own works, Giannone and Vico are likely to have been aware of the cases of two fellow Neapolitans who had risen to prominence in clerical-intellectual circles in Rome: Celestino Galiani and Biagio Garofalo. Despite enjoying the patronage of prominent cardinals, and even papal favour, both men were enmeshed in reviews by the Index in the 1710s, Galiani for a set of moderately modernizing theses on the Bible, and Garofalo for a monograph comparing biblical Hebrew and ancient Greek poetry (including Homer).Footnote ⁵⁰

It was soon after this that both Giannone and Vico were made directly aware of Rome's power. Giannone most directly, since his first great work, the Storia civile del regno di Napoli (1723) caused immediate uproar among the Neapolitan clergy, and was banned at their instigation by the Holy Office. Giannone himself left hurriedly for exile in Vienna.Footnote ⁵¹ Vico initially sought to take advantage of Giannone's fate, writing to well-placed friends and potential patrons in Rome to claim that his new work would refute the heretics Hobbes, Spinoza, and Bayle.Footnote ⁵² But, despite his pleading, Vico was rebuffed, and eventually even he came to the notice of the Inquisition, which prevented the appearance of a second, Venetian publication of the Scienza nuova prima in 1729.Footnote ⁵³

Nevertheless, the implications of this situation need to be teased out. I do not think that they necessitate an esoteric reading of Giannone's and Vico's works, on the assumption that they must have been hiding their real message.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is too easy to make this assumption, without investigating either the intentions or the local effectiveness of the censorial regime. Giannone turned to sacred history in the relative freedom of exile in Vienna, where he had access to new libraries, which contained more Protestant heterodoxy than had been available to him in Naples. But he still wrote for a Catholic audience, addressing himself to the Catholic princes of Italy; he clearly hoped that his work would be published.Footnote ⁵⁵ What he did, I want to suggest, was frame his work in terms which took the Roman agenda in sacred history as a starting point, the better to exploit the opportunities it provided.

While Vico's personal situation was rather different, he may be seen to have done something similar. Although his efforts to secure patronage in Rome were rebuffed, there is no good reason to doubt his orthodox intentions. When he told a correspondent in 1724 that he would draw the principles of his ‘new science’ ‘from within those of sacred history’ (‘dentro quelli della sacra storia’), this was not a cover.Footnote ⁵⁶ Rather, he would work within the prescribed framework – and exploit its possibilities. In short, I want to argue that in both cases the intellectual preoccupations of the Roman authorities framed the enquiry, but could not determine how it would proceed.

IV

Giannone composed his meditation on sacred history, the ‘Triregno’, between 1731 and 1733, on summer vacations in the country outside Vienna. The work could not be published in the eighteenth century, but survives in manuscript copies, one of which was printed in 1940.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is in three parts, dealing in turn with the Earthly, the Celestial and the papal kingdoms. (Hence the ‘tri-kingdom’ of the title, which also alludes to the papal tiara.) A few years later, Giannone gave an account of the conception of the work in his Autobiography. Stepping back from the study of modern realms and empires to resume his philosophical studies, he had set out

For this purpose, Giannone had had recourse to the two oldest accounts of human history, the Pentateuch of Moses and (from a few centuries later) the poems of Homer. To these he had added Josephus, for the history of the Hebrews, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and Strabo. From the Pentateuch, along with the equally old Book of Job, Giannone had been able to reconstruct man in his first ‘state of nature’, when he had no other object but worldly felicity.Footnote ⁵⁹ Set off against this ‘earthly kingdom’ was the second, ‘heavenly kingdom’, which represented the ‘state of grace’. This was the kingdom Christ had preached, in which the souls of men would live immortally in their resurrected bodies. But when the heavenly kingdom proved less imminent than Christ's followers expected, the church had established instead its own ‘papal kingdom’, a kingdom as earthly as its ancient predecessor, but in which the clergy had usurped civil power.Footnote ⁶⁰

Giannone began the ‘Triregno’ itself by clarifying the sources and framework of his enquiry into the ‘Regno terreno’. In doing so, he demonstrated just how well he understood the agenda of sacred history – and how he meant to exploit it. In the first place, he was happy to work within the chronology provided by the Vulgate, knowing that consistency between the various available chronologies was impossible. What was important was that profane as well as sacred history could be contained within the 4,000 years of the Vulgate, a supposition supported by James Ussher. A certain time span was required in order to treat events in succession, and in the end it mattered little whether it was exactly true, truth being impossible to establish in those ‘dark abysses of time’.Footnote ⁶¹

Giannone was likewise content to work from the Pentateuch, as the oldest of the books of this world, and a better record of the ‘earthly kingdom’ than that offered by any profane writer. This was not to suppose that Moses had been the master of all the arts and sciences, and the archetype of all later philosophers and lawgivers. Giannone was contemptuous of claims to this effect by Eusebius, and, in his own time, by Bochart and Huet. Moses’ learning, as Luke had remarked in Acts (7:22), was the wisdom of the Egyptians.Footnote ⁶² Giannone also acknowledged that Moses’ authorship of the Pentateuch had been doubted by a succession of commentators from Ibn-Ezra to Le Clerc. But he rejected the negative criticism of Hobbes, Peyrère, and Spinoza in favour of ‘the system of Richard Simon’, which he regarded as ‘the most plausible’. If it was very unlikely that Moses had written the five books in the form in which they survived, it was still probable that they derived from originals spoken by him. The Pentateuch was like the poems of Homer: we should not expect either to be preserved exactly as Moses and Homer had recited them.Footnote ⁶³

It was a further question whether Moses could be regarded as divinely inspired. Giannone examined and dismissed all the usual grounds for this claim. Arguments from the New Testament or the authority of the church begged the question, while the contention of the Fathers that divine inspiration was proved by the miracles Moses recorded could equally apply to the profane historians whose works were full of every kind of miracle. Even Spinoza's claim that divine inspiration was inherent in Moses’ teaching of true virtue could be applied to gentile authors. Alluding to Grotius, Pascal, and others, Giannone hinted that better proofs of the divinity of the books of Moses might yet be found; but in the end he concluded that the question did not need his answer.Footnote ⁶⁴ What mattered were Moses’ intentions, and it was clear that he had written as a historian, not as a philosopher (‘non come filosofo, ma come istorico’), in order to teach and render governable a simple, primitive people. To this end, he had provided the ancient Hebrews with an account of the creation of the world and of their own genealogy, enabling them to believe that they were the oldest people in the world. The same belief was evident in the histories of every other ancient people; the value of the Pentateuch was that it was the oldest such history to survive.Footnote ⁶⁵

Having set out the terms on which he would investigate sacred history, Giannone devoted the first part of the ‘Triregno’ to the evidence it yielded of man's earliest life in his natural, earthly kingdom. The bulk of this evidence he derived from the Pentateuch and the closely related Book of Job,Footnote ⁶⁶ which covered the explanation of the world's beginnings, its peopling and the earliest development of languages, and more specifically the wanderings of the Patriarchs and the return of the Israelites from Egypt under Moses’ leadership. But evidence little less important was to be derived from the books of Judges, Kings, and the Prophets. Much of what Giannone wrote was devoted to issues of interpretation: repeatedly, he was obliged to clear away the often ridiculous errors of his predecessors, from Eusebius to Bochart, Huet, and even Grotius. For Giannone, however, the interpretation of sacred history was not an end in itself: what he sought to uncover were the conditions which had made it possible for early men to live in ‘a civil society’ (‘una società civile’). The ‘laws’ or ‘dictates’ of nature which had to be observed by those who would live in society rather than return to ‘the feral life’ (‘la vita ferina e brutale’) were few and simple, amounting to the preservation of society, the safety of the people, and their greater ease and commodity. Precisely because they were few, however, the dictates of nature were liable to great variation in their expression. What the Bible recorded was a striking diversity in the customs of the peoples with which it was concerned, in no case more so than that of the Hebrews. Customs which would later seem damnable were perfectly in accord with the basic laws of nature and social survival.Footnote ⁶⁷ Three aspects of the life of the Hebrews and their ancient contemporaries were identified by Giannone as crucial to such survival.

The first concerned their reproduction as a people. To this end, the Hebrews had availed themselves of every means available. Polygamy, incest, prostitution, and concubinage had been practised by the Patriarchs, the Judges, and the Kings of Israel alike, as many examples attested.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Hebrews had made both marriage and divorce easy, while treating widowhood and virginity as shameful. A poignant example of the last was the daughter of Jepthah, one of the Judges, who had begged her father for a postponement of her sacrificial death so that she might lament her virginity with her friends.Footnote ⁶⁹ By contrast, promiscuity was encouraged; Giannone also suggested that the practice of circumcision had been maintained to facilitate coitus. Prominent among the heroes of Hebrew promiscuity was Samson, one of the Judges, who had sought a wife among the Philistines, saw a harlot in Gaza, and loved Delilah in Sorek. But those who simply took concubines from among their servants, like Jacob, or the kings David, Solomon, and Reheboam, were no less commendable. (Solomon, it will be recalled, had 700 wives and 300 concubines at his death.)Footnote ⁷⁰ What were damnable were practices which frustrated procreation, coupling between men and with beasts, and the abuse to which Onan subjected Tamar.Footnote ⁷¹

Equally necessary to the survival of society were the acquisition and possession of territory. Here too the Hebrews had set an extreme example. The modern law of nations might prohibit dispossession on religious grounds, but the Hebrews would not only attack without warning; they used the utmost cruelty to secure the land they needed. Whole cities had been massacred, sacked, and burned, the corpses of their inhabitants left as food for the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth – all because the God of Heaven and Earth had promised the land to Abraham and his seed.Footnote ⁷² Among the Judges, Ehud, whose knife disappeared into the fat belly of the king of Moab, and Jael, who drove a nail through Sisera's temples and fastened it to the ground, had set fine examples of righteous slaughter, only to be outdone by the mass killings of Samson. And when the people decided that kings would do an even better job, only to find that Saul let them down and spared the Amalekites, Samuel had stepped up and ‘hewed’ the Amalekite king Agag in pieces.Footnote ⁷³ Of course, what the Hebrews suffered at the hands of their neighbours and rivals for the territory of Palestine was little less extreme. Nevertheless, the lengths to which the Hebrews were prepared to go exemplified how the earliest societies had sought to survive and flourish in this world.

The third requisite of civil society had been religious worship. More specifically, the survival of an individual people had depended on its distinguishing its religious practices from those of others. For this purpose, Moses had provided the Israelites with an account of the world's creation by their God, telling the story in a way which clearly separated God from his creation, and obviated any suggestion of pantheism.Footnote ⁷⁴ As presented in the Book of Genesis, the religion of Noah had been one of the utmost simplicity, without rites, ceremonies, priests, temples, or altars.Footnote ⁷⁵ But it could not be disguised that this original simplicity had proved impossible to sustain. No more than any other ancient people had the Hebrews remained uncontaminated by the religious practices of their neighbours. The inlet was the practice of circumcision, which Abraham had learned in Egypt. Giannone saw no point in denying the Egyptian origins of circumcision, which had been attested by ancient and confirmed by modern authorities, notably Marsham and Spencer. The practice was adopted, as we have seen, for physical and natural reasons. It was imposed by Abraham upon his son Ishmael, from whom were descended the Arabs, as well as upon Isaac. If Moses had nonetheless insisted that the practice was initiated by Abraham in his covenant with God, in return for the promised birth of his second son Isaac, it was because he needed to present a rite which Abraham and later the Hebrews as a whole had learned while in exile among the Egyptians as one original to themselves.Footnote ⁷⁶ It was no paradox that idolatry, the worship of other gods and the adoption of their rites, was the first of the prohibitions which Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, even as accommodation to it lay at the heart of the Israelites’ religious practice. It was by acquiring and practising a composite of rites, and telling themselves that they were original, that ancient peoples like the Hebrews sealed their identity.

The fear of idolatry inculcated by Moses would only be aggravated by the prophets. As Giannone observed, just as many doctors bring many illnesses, many prophets signal much idolatry. The ‘audacity’ and ‘temerity’ of these men knew no bounds.Footnote ⁷⁷ Because every cult had its prophets, false prophets had to be eliminated. Elijah set the standard when he had the 450 prophets of Baal put to death at Kishon.Footnote ⁷⁸ By the same token, a true prophet's dignity had to be maintained, even against children. Mocked by little children after claiming to watch the ascent of Elijah in his chariot of fire – ‘Go up, thou bald head, go up’ – Elisha had summoned two she-bears to ‘tare’ forty-two of the young miscreants apart.Footnote ⁷⁹ For all the mayhem they caused, however, the prophets had not altered the end of their people's religion. The benefits they promised to worshippers of the true God were not other-worldly, but survival and prosperity on earth.Footnote ⁸⁰ Not until after the return from Babylonian captivity was there the first intimation of the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and of reward in a future life.Footnote ⁸¹ Until then, the religion of the Old Testament remained an earthly, natural, or civil religion, whose purpose was to maintain the existence and the identity of the Hebrew people.

Out of the evidence of sacred history, as the oldest documented history available, Giannone thus reconstructed man's passage from ‘the feral life’ to ‘civil society’. In doing so, he addressed and offered an historical answer to the problem of sociability. He did not frame the problem in specifically Hobbesian terms, or even in those of Pufendorf: the language of a passage from the beastly to the civil is Ciceronian,Footnote ⁸² while the association of society with families and religious worship was common to all the ancient sources, Lucretius, Diodorus, and Cicero as well as the Pentateuch. But what Giannone found in the Old Testament was the first recorded account of the formation of society. What had mattered above all to the Hebrews as to the other peoples of ancient sacred and profane history were the propagation of families and the possession of territory. These were the indispensable conditions of survival and happiness in the earthly kingdom. These goals in turn were justified and reinforced by the adoption of religious beliefs and forms of worship supposed to be exclusive to each people. That it had been impossible to avoid borrowing the practices of others, and falling into idolatry, had only intensified the insistence on exclusiveness, exemplified in the Hebrews’ determination to fasten their identity as the people of the God of Abraham and of Moses. Such was the natural historical state of man (as distinct from the state of grace), and it was from that natural state that civil society had been formed: as Giannone interpreted it, sacred history showed how the peoples of the Bible had learned sociability in the hardest, most earthly of ways.Footnote ⁸³

V

Vico, as we have seen, also set out to draw his principles from ‘within’ sacred history.Footnote ⁸⁴ The work in which he would do so was the Scienza nuova, published in three successive editions, in 1725, 1730, and 1744.Footnote ⁸⁵ In keeping with his professions of orthodox intent, the First new science began by refuting Bayle's thesis that a society of atheists was as plausible as a society of idolaters; it also gave prominence to the Fall.Footnote ⁸⁶ For the second New science of 1730, however, Vico completely altered the structure of the work, and gave it a very different introduction. Following a preface in which he explained the iconographical significance of his frontispiece, he inserted a ‘Chronological Table’, accompanied by a lengthy commentary. The significance of these alterations has, I think, been underestimated.Footnote ⁸⁷

Ostensibly, the Table proclaimed Vico's chronological orthodoxy by adhering to the dates of the Vulgate; it also affirmed the priority of the Hebrews over the Egyptians, the Chaldeans, and the Chinese, notwithstanding the scholarship of Marsham and Spencer, which Vico dismissed.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the commentary, however, it quickly becomes clear that Vico is using the same scholarship to show that every date in gentile history is ‘highly uncertain’ (‘tutto incertissimo’). Key figures in the history of the gentile nations – the Egyptian Hermes, the Chaldean Zoroaster – are, in Vico's words, ‘chronological monsters’. They can only be regarded as poetic or mythic archetypes. Precisely as such, however, they are the keys to the histories of their nations, for myths, according to Vico, are the earliest evidence of popular beliefs and practices.Footnote ⁸⁹ Like Giannone, in other words, Vico accepted the Vulgate chronology on his own terms: what was important was that it allowed him to include the histories of the profane or gentile nations within the same framework. In the case of the latter, he was then free to hollow out their chronologies, thereby enabling himself to rewrite their history from their myths.

Vico's history begins following the one secure date in his Table, the Flood of the year 1656 after Creation. Upon leaving the Ark, the children of Noah had divided. As Vico imagined it, men and women had spread out across the soggy earth, and were soon reduced to a state of feral isolation, wandering aimlessly and coupling at random; wallowing in their own faeces, they grew to the stature of giants. They became, as Vico put it, Hobbes's ‘fierce and violent men’. At some point, the offspring of Shem, the Hebrews, had broken away, and by keeping to ritual laws of cleanliness, had reduced themselves to normal size. Having done so, the Hebrews leave Vico's story, while the gentile giants pursue a different path to society.

As the earth gradually dried out, the exhalations caused thunderstorms. These terrified the giants, who supposed that the thunder must be a god, whom they worshipped and called Jove. Now ashamed of coupling in the open in front of Jove, they took their women off into caves, where they settled, married, and were able to identify their own children, forming families. When members of the family died, they were buried, a practice indicative of a belief in the immortality of the soul, as well as the basis of a claim to territory. Through these three institutions of idolatrous worship, family, and burial, accordingly, the giants were socialized. In due course, the families descended from the mountains to the coasts, where contact would be made with others. Even so, Vico insisted that nations first developed independently: only very gradually did they realize that they shared a ‘common sense’ of what is required for social life. Through that ‘common sense’ they in due course recognized the existence of a common ‘natural law’ of sociability.Footnote ⁹⁰

The device of re-starting the history of mankind from the Flood, adopted explicitly in the second New science, which, unlike the first, contained only passing allusions of the earlier period, was not of course original to Vico. Since the Renaissance, the hiatus of the Flood had provided an opportunity to merge the history found in Genesis with the surviving histories of other ancient peoples, in particular those collected by Diodorus Siculus.Footnote ⁹¹ Vico likewise combined ‘la Storia Sagra’ (Genesis) with ‘le [storie] profane’, as reported by Diodorus; but he was confident, as was Giannone, that the former was older than any of the profane histories,

The claims of the profane histories to unique antiquity were examples of the ‘conceit’ of nations; only the Hebrews had clearly preserved a memory of themselves since the beginning of the world.Footnote ⁹³ Vico supplemented the sacred and profane sources with references to more recent, late Renaissance studies of particular episodes: among these were Scoockio (Marten Schook) on the Flood, Cassanione (Jean Chassagnon) on giants, Linschotano (Hugo van Linschooten) on the practice of burial in Guinea.Footnote ⁹⁴ He was likewise aware of the characterizations of the ‘state of nature’ found in Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Bayle, even if we cannot be sure that he had read either Hobbes or Bayle directly.Footnote ⁹⁵ But what Vico made of these sources was a story very much his own, a wonderfully imaginative adaptation of sacred history.

On the face of it, Vico's adaptation of sacred history was rather more orthodox than Giannone's. Not only did he loudly proclaim his intention to refute Hobbes, Spinoza, and above all Bayle. There was no hint of equivocation in Vico's adoption of the Vulgate chronology, even as he took full advantage of its intervals. By his immediate separation of the Hebrew offspring of Shem from the gentile descendants of his brothers, he also ensured against any suggestion that the Hebrews’ worship had been contaminated by Egyptian or other gentile idolatry. Finally, he was at pains to demonstrate that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was universal to men, and by no means the later invention of philosophers. On closer inspection, however, Vico's ‘orthodoxy’ was not all that it seemed. Along with the Hebrews into the wings of Vico's story went the kingdom of grace itself: Christ is mentioned only twice and in passing in the New science,Footnote ⁹⁶ while the history of the early church is subsumed within the ‘ricorso’ of the nations following the fall of the Roman Empire, instead of being treated apart, as the subject-matter of post-biblical sacred history.Footnote ⁹⁷ Still more radical were the implications of Vico's ultimate characterization of his ‘new science’ as a ‘reasoned civil theology of divine providence’ – una teologia civile ragionata della provvedenza divina.Footnote ⁹⁸ A theology of divine providence which was ‘civil’ rather than natural, ‘reasoned’ rather than revealed, suggests that Vico conceived of the Scienza nuova as independent of the realms both of Nature and of Grace.

To make Vico's ‘orthodoxy’ the issue, however, is to miss the point. Unlike Giannone, Vico did everything he could to avoid it becoming the issue, with relative success.Footnote ⁹⁹ Much more important is what he was doing when he began the Scienza nuova from ‘within sacred history’, and proceeded to construct his ‘reasoned civil theology of divine providence’. What Vico was doing, I wish to argue, was similar to the task Giannone set himself in the ‘Triregno’: he was confronting the problem of human sociability, by exploiting the resources of sacred history in order to reconstruct the earliest history of mankind. As he put it at the outset of the second New science, God by his providence

If anything, Vico was more up-to-date than Giannone in his grasp of the problem. He knew that it was Hobbes who had dramatized its formulation with his solitary ‘fierce and violent men’. He knew too that the problem had been reformulated by Bayle, in even more provocative terms, when he suggested that a society formed out of atheists was at least as plausible a hypothesis as a society of idolaters.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Faced with these new versions of the problem, Vico did not seek to defend a conventional, Aristotelian assertion of man's natural sociability: on the contrary, sacred history confirmed that the condition of man after the Flood had been one of natural unsociability, in which men and women had roamed alone, living in a manner very similar to beasts. But if this was the natural condition of mankind, it was a historical condition; and the history of the gentile peoples of the world, as well as of the Hebrews, showed how men had learned, whether by idolatry or by revealed religion, to form families, to lay claim to portions of the earth in order to bury their dead, and, in due course, to constitute societies. From ‘within’ sacred history Vico would thus answer Hobbes and Bayle with a strictly historical, civil account of man's socialization through idolatry and the institutions of the family and burial, all under the aegis of a divine providence which was explicitly distinguished from divine grace, while operating on man separately from nature. Like Giannone, but on different and in some respects even more radical terms, Vico had taken the Roman Catholic agenda of sacred history and re-worked it in the cause of answering one of the most pressing problems in contemporary political thought.

VI

The significance of Giannone's achievement in the ‘Triregno’ and Vico's in the Scienza nuova needs to be kept in perspective. It is tempting to suggest that they carry us to the threshold of Enlightenment – or, in Vico's case, Counter-Enlightenment. But the tendency to suppose that every intellectual innovation of the eighteenth century should be associated with one or the other should be resisted. Enlightenment needs precise intellectual definition if it is to be useful as a category of historical enquiry; it is not a portmanteau. In the case of Giannone, a good case may be made for situating him within the early or radical Enlightenment of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries (as long as radical Enlightenment is not reduced to Spinozism).Footnote ¹⁰² By contrast, the identification of Vico with Counter-Enlightenment is an anachronism, since the emergence of an anti-philosophe movement lay some decades in the future.Footnote ¹⁰³ As it was, through using all their intellectual ingenuity to adapt Rome's agenda for sacred history, Giannone and Vico produced histories quite different from, for example, Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs (1756), whose starting point lay outwith sacred history altogether.

The study of sacred history continued later in the eighteenth century, in Robert Lowth's Lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews (1753), and in the scholarship which Johann David Michaelis would devote to the languages and history of the Hebrews and the other peoples of the ancient Near East. These have made it possible to tell a story of ‘the Enlightenment Bible’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The second phase of sacred history, the history of the early church, was a similarly persistent preoccupation, not least in England, and most of all for Edward Gibbon.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But there was, perforce, no connection between the sacred historical interests of the Enlightenment and the work of either Giannone or Vico. The ‘Triregno’ remained in manuscript, the few copies which were not confiscated circulating more or less clandestinely; the Scienza nuova was left untranslated, shown to, but not read by visitors to Naples, and virtually unknown outside Italy until the very end of the century.

Nevertheless, I have sought to show that the intellectual achievement of Giannone and Vico was remarkable in itself, and that it embodied a distinctive response to the problem of sociability, as one of the transformative questions facing political thinkers in the 150 years after the publication of Hobbes's Leviathan. As such, the achievement of Giannone and Vico was all the more significant because it came from within Catholic intellectual culture. However enriched the two authors were by the access to Protestant philosophy and scholarship afforded them by the libraries of Naples and (in Giannone's case) Vienna, both worked under the shadow of Rome, and had to adapt to the intellectual agenda propagated by the Congregations of the Holy Office and the Index. Both faced an obstacle their Protestant contemporaries did not, and whose power even over Catholic thinkers was much less in France or central Europe than it was in Italy. Yet, Giannone and Vico found ways to turn the Roman agenda to intellectual advantage, deploying sacred history to investigate anew the formation of human society. By giving Giannone, Vico, and Naples their due, we can begin to correct the tunnel vision which has allowed the story of political thought after Hobbes to become an exclusively Protestant one – and thence, all too easily, a secular one.

VII

This article began life as an inaugural lecture in Cambridge, an occasion on which a methodological observation seemed de rigueur. I would like to end by adapting what I said then. It seems to me that while what is loosely called ‘the Cambridge approach’ to the history of political thought has been widely, if not quite universally, endorsed, it now faces a fork in the road. On the one hand, the desire to broaden the perspective in which political thought is studied is taking many scholars, especially younger ones, off into the broader pastures of intellectual history, there to absorb, and sometimes submerge, political thought within concurrent developments in scholarship, in other fields of philosophy, in theology, and, from the eighteenth century, in political economy.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ On the other hand, the conviction often associated with the Cambridge School that the history of political thought should inform the study of problems in modern politics may now be encountering more resistance than before from the political theorists.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A historian who has no qualification as a political theorist or philosopher, such as this author, is in no position to overcome this divide; indeed, this article may well be read as exemplary of the first tendency, dragging the history of political thought down into the abyss of sacred history.

In spite – or because – of this, I would still emphasize how important it is for intellectual historians and historians of political thought to remind ourselves of what we have in common with political theorists and philosophers. For them, the currency of intellectual endeavour is good argument. For us, the subject of enquiry is also argument: we seek to do justice to the persistence and depth of the human effort, using what seem to be the best-developed intellectual resources at the time, to understand and conceptualize the way we live in societies and political communities. As intellectual historians, we need to affirm the importance of studying arguments if we are to resist those who would now treat ideas as but the ‘representations’ of something else, and envelop them in an all-encompassing ‘cultural history’. Increasingly fashionable, cultural history framed in these terms bids fair to be the new reductionism. Intellectual history cannot of course be confined to the superstructure of argument; we also need to explore the political, social, and institutional infrastructure which in any period has sustained intellectual life. But the superstructure of argument remains our central focus, and we need to insist, against the reductionists, on its relative autonomy.