Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Giambattista Vico
- 3 Phenomenology
- 4 Hermeneutics
- 5 Marxism and language
- 6 Lev Vygotsky
- 7 Meanings and perspectives
- 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 9 Gregory Bateson
- 10 Sociologies – Micro and Macro
- 11 Sources of the self
- 12 Michel Foucault and his challenges
- 13 Discourse analysis
- 14 Ken and Mary Gergen
- 15 Rom Harré
- 16 John Shotter
- 17 Concluding remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Giambattista Vico
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Giambattista Vico
- 3 Phenomenology
- 4 Hermeneutics
- 5 Marxism and language
- 6 Lev Vygotsky
- 7 Meanings and perspectives
- 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein
- 9 Gregory Bateson
- 10 Sociologies – Micro and Macro
- 11 Sources of the self
- 12 Michel Foucault and his challenges
- 13 Discourse analysis
- 14 Ken and Mary Gergen
- 15 Rom Harré
- 16 John Shotter
- 17 Concluding remarks
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Darwin has interested us in the history of Nature's Technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisation, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in this, that we have made the former, but not the latter?
(Karl Marx, Capital, 1930/1867 vol. I, p. 372 n. 3)Vico's science genuinely was new, both in his theory and in his practice; and the novelty remains even now, because he has only been partially understood, and understood usually in a tame, domesticated sense, which disguises his subversive meanings.
(Stuart Hampshire, Joyce and Vico: The Middle Way, New York Review of Books, 18 October 1973)The poetic mind can make assertions that are nonsense for the rational mind. (Verene, 1981: 77)
The world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and … its principles are therefore to be recovered within the modifications of our own human mind.
(Vico, 1948[1744]: 331)Contemporary social constructionism has deep historical roots that predate the modern era. The history of those premodern roots is beyond the focus of our efforts here.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social ConstructionismSources and Stirrings in Theory and Practice, pp. 12 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010