In this chapter, we turn to Spanish and Austrian Naples, where the rhetoric teacher Giambattista Vico lived during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this new stage of the long-standing querelle we have been tracing, Vico’s critique engages directly with the developments advanced by René Descartes along the well-worn path of certainty. After outlining the biographical, social, and political context in which Vico lived, as well as the various intellectual and religious currents driving the enthusiasm for the new method, this chapter will explore the Neapolitan thinker’s opposition to the Cartesian project as a way of gradually introducing his alternative theoretical vision. Vico thus proposes a new approach to education, once again rooted in the cultivation of the citizen’s soul, as a way to better prepare individuals for the uncertainties of public life. A democratic disposition in one’s self-government, he argues, equips citizens to refrain from exiling, silencing, or chaining any of their neighbors. Vico’s critique of barbarism aligns with early challenges posed by Sephardic Jewish thinkers to the figure of the subject at the heart of Enlightenment secularization. In the face of the corsi e ricorsi of history that we once again endure, returning to Vico today may offer essential insights for (re)constructing democracy in our time.