SOURCE: “On the Pioneer Trail,” in New York Review of Books, November 11, 1976, pp. 33-8.

In the following reflection on Berlin's Vico and Herder, Momigliano focuses on the problem of what relation pluralism bears to relativism inside cultural and historical contexts.

I

There is perhaps a slight element of prejudice in the opinion, widespread among us Piedmontese, that San Gennaro and Giambattista Vico must be left to the Neapolitans. This opinion is in deed prejudiced in so far as it does not take into account that both San Gennaro and Vico have proved embarrassing to educated Neapolitans, and more especially to the descendants of those lawyers who in the eighteenth century came down from the provinces to Naples to fill high positions in the administration and who embodied the Enlightenment.

Benedetto Croce and Fausto Nicolini, the scions of two such Abruzzese families (as Nicolini was fond of recollecting), are...