New Science by Giambattista Vico
Published 1725 · 488 pages · 171,440 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Philosophy, History, Nonfiction
How hard is New Science to read?
New Science scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 83 out of 100
- Vico saturates the text with specialized terminology from Roman law (allodia, fiefs, quiritary right, perduellio, ius gentium), Greek mythology, and 18th-century learned Latin — terms like 'Cyclopean paternal authority,' 'heroic commonwealths,' and 'the age of the Quirites' appear constantly. The Thomas Bergin and Max Fisch translation preserves untranslated Latin legal formulae and Greek phrases throughout, and Vico's systematic re-interpretation of common words ('giants,' 'heroes,' 'gods') requires readers to hold two semantic registers simultaneously. This exceeds Moby-Dick's specialized vocabulary but falls short of Gravity's Rainbow's encyclopedic scientific jargon, since classical context occasionally clarifies meaning.
- Sentence structure: 74 out of 100
- Vico's sentences are long and hypotactic, frequently running to four or five subordinate clauses with embedded parenthetical qualifications and cross-references to numbered axioms. Sentences regularly open with a proposition, qualify it through a classical example, invoke an axiom by number, and close with a further qualification — a structure demanding sustained attention but not reaching Faulkner's extreme compression or James's five-deep embedding. The numbered axiom system imposes a degree of navigability absent from more purely syntactic challenges like Absalom, Absalom!
- Abstraction: 89 out of 100
- The New Science operates almost entirely at the level of philosophical abstraction: theories of poetic wisdom, the 'modifications of the reflective mind,' the three ages of gods, heroes, and humans, and the cyclical 'ricorso' of civilization. Historical figures (Homer, Romulus, Hercules) appear not as narrative subjects but as evidence for abstract theses about the structure of human development. This approaches The Waste Land's pure abstraction while remaining grounded in historical argument, placing it above Brothers Karamazov (75) and Gravity's Rainbow (80).
- Information density: 87 out of 100
- Nearly every paragraph introduces new claims about mythology, philology, Roman law, Greek history, and Vico's own cross-referenced axioms simultaneously. A single page may reinterpret the myth of Cadmus, cite Tacitus, invoke three numbered axioms, and derive conclusions about feudal law — all as a continuous argumentative chain. This exceeds War and Peace's historical density because every sentence carries conceptual weight; there are no narrative breathing spaces. The encyclopedic cross-referencing rivals Ulysses in demands on sustained reader attention.
- Narrative indirection: 65 out of 100
- Vico states his arguments directly and with conviction — he explicitly introduces each thesis as a 'discovery' of his science. However, his entire method requires readers to infer the 'poetic logic' underlying ancient myths: he does not narrate Jupiter's thunder but explains what early humans inferred from it, and readers must then re-assemble those inferences into his larger system. The interpretive work lies not in an unreliable narrator but in tracking the gap between what myths say and what Vico argues they encode.
- Symbolic density: 88 out of 100
- Vico's entire methodology treats ancient myth as dense symbolic compression of historical and social reality. Jupiter's thunderbolt symbolizes the founding terror of religion; Hercules represents heroic labor; the myth of Cadmus encodes 'several centuries of poetic history.' Every classical figure is simultaneously a historical actor and a systematic symbol in Vico's interpretive grid. This symbolic saturation is comparable to Moby-Dick (90), though the symbols are decoded rather than accumulated.
- Ironic distance: 12 out of 100
- Vico maintains a consistently authoritative and earnest tone, presenting each discovery as a triumph of his new science over the errors of prior philosophers and philologists. He directly critiques Grotius, Pufendorf, and Selden by name for their 'learned conceit' without satirical deflection. There is no gap between what the text says and what Vico means — he is entirely sincere in advancing his system, placing him far below the ironists in this calibration.
- Resolution withholding: 22 out of 100
- The New Science is a systematic philosophical project aimed at providing definitive resolution: Vico consistently offers each chapter as a 'proof' of his principles and closes sections with confident conclusions. The cyclical ricorso means history is open-ended as a theoretical claim, but Vico presents this as a discovered truth rather than a literary ambiguity. The text's entire purpose is to close questions that prior scholarship left confused, not to withhold resolution.
- Structural complexity: 58 out of 100
- The text follows a systematic progression through numbered axioms, sections, and chapters — poetic metaphysics, poetic logic, poetic morality, poetic economics, poetic politics — with explicit cross-referencing throughout. The structure is hierarchical and cumulative rather than fragmented or experimental. Complexity arises from the constant cross-referencing between hundreds of axioms and the multi-disciplinary synthesis, not from temporal fragmentation or POV experimentation. More complex than War and Peace (40) in its argumentative layering, less so than Pedro Paramo (80) in structural disruption.
How New Science is regarded
New Science holds a literary regard score of 84 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.