Vico held that providence converts private passions into civil institutions behind men’s backs

Evidence

The actual phrase is not Vico’s it is perhaps an echo of Hegel’s “ruse of reason”—but the idea is. Vico’s theory of divine providence held that men themselves constructed a world according to a divine plan of which they were not aware. “For out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, it [providence] has made the civil institutions by which they may live in human society.” Vico, The New Science , Cornell, 1968, p. 62. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2047

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Defines Vico’s providential mechanism — passions unconsciously building civil order — which Gramsci invokes as precedent for his own account of how historical forces work through agents who misrecognize their effects.
• XREF: This is the ‘providence as ruse of reason’ idea that parallels Gramsci’s later discussion of how dominant ideas propagate through subjects who think they act freely.