In "Orientalism" (1978), Edward Said acknowledged his scholar's debt to Vico, whose "ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers I am about to cite. They belong to the era of Herder and Wolf, later to be followed by Goethe, Humboldt, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and finally the great twentieth century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius." As a humanist and early philologist, Vico represented "a different, alternative model that has been extremely important to me in my work", which differed from mainstream Western prejudice against the Orient and the dominating "standardization" that came with modernity and culminated in National Socialism. That the interdependence of human history and culture facilitates the scholars' task to "take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography. As geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, and geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made."