Giambattista Vico: Critical Legal Studies in Contextual Historical Mode?

Abstract

The original thought of Giambattista Vico can provide a different avenue of understanding international law departing from Critical Legal Studies (CLS) by way of making contextual history. According to Vico, history was a human creation upon which history moved in an orbit rather than a straight line to progress, as the Enlightenment proposes. Under such a Vichian perspective, the understanding of ideas, institutions, and civilizations should be judged as elements of their own time; with their own goals, symbols, rituals, art, languages, gestures, myths, social customs, and law. Thus, avoiding presentism and anachronism. Vico provides an alternative method to the understanding of international law through history.