Hans Baron

Hans Baron (1900-1988) was an acclaimed German historian of political thought and literature in the Italian Renaissance. His main contribution to the historiography of the period was to introduce in 1928 the term "civic humanism" (denoting most if not all of the content of "classical republicanism"). [ [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humanism-civic/ "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"] ; [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19375 Anthony Grafton, "New York Review of Books"] : "In the 1920s and 1930s, Hans Baron, a brilliant German Jewish scholar, decided that the young Latinists of fifteenth-century Florence— above all Leonardo Bruni, the city's longtime chancellor—had created an intellectual movement, one that he eventually christened 'civic humanism.' These moderns, he argued, sought to revive not only classical texts, but classical values as well. They held that the best way to emulate the ancients, and the highest form of human achievement, was to lead an active life of republican citizenship."]

Life and career

Born in Berlin of a Jewish family, Baron was a student of the liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch. [ [http://www.ushmm.org/research/center/publications/occasional/2006-02/paper.pdf Georg G. Iggers, "Refugee Historians from Nazi Germany,"] p. 10.] After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he left Germany, first for Italy and England, then in 1938 for the United States. He was a Distinguished Research Fellow and held a teaching appointment at the University of Chicago for many years.

His most important work, "The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance" (1955), theorized that a threatened invasion of the Florentine city-state by the French had a dramatic effect on their conception of the directionality of history. Previously believing that good necessarily prevailed, upon considering the thought-to-be impending doom of the Florentine republic by a French monarchy, some Florentine thinkers began to think otherwise.

Baron theorized that it was this shift in understanding that allowed later thinkers like Niccolò Machiavelli to construct his view that free states required a politically "realistic" outlook in order to survive.

Works

* "Calvin Staatsanschauung und das konfessionalle Zeitalter" (Berlin;Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1924).
* "Leonardo Bruni Aretino. Humanistisch-philosophische Schriftten" (Leipzig;Berlin: B.G. Teubner, 1928;1969).
* "The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: civic humanism and republican liberty in an age of classicism and tyranny" (Princeton: 1955;1966).
* "Humanistic and Political Literature in Florence and Venice at the beginning of the quattrocento; studies in criticism and chronology" (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1955;1968).
* "From Petrarch to Bruni; studies in humanistic and political literature" (Chicago: 1968).
* "Petrarch’s Secretum: its making and its meaning" (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1985).
* "In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism : essays on the transition from medieval to modern thought", 2 vols. (Princeton: 1988).

References

* Wallace K. Ferguson, "The Interpretation of Italian Humanism: the Contribution of Hans Baron," "Journal of the History of Ideas" 19(1958), 14-25. Baron's reply immediately follows.
* Anthony Molho and John A. Teseschi, eds. "Renaissance Studies in Honor of Hans Baron" (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois Univ. Press, 1971).
* Alison Brown, "Hans Baron's Renaissance," "Historical Journal" 33(1990), 441-448.
* Donald R. Kelley, "Renaissance Humanism" (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991).
* Riccardo Fubini, "Renaissance Historian: the Career of Hans Baron," "Journal of Modern History" 64(1992), 541-574.
* James Hankins, "The 'Baron Thesis' after Forty Years and some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni," "Journal of the History of Ideas" 56,2(Apr. 1995), 309-330.
** Hankins, ed. "Renaissance Civic Humanism : reappraisals and reflections" (Cambridge: 2000).
* Ronald Witt, John M. Najemy, Craig Kallendorf, and Werner Gundersheimer, "AHR" Forum: Hans Baron's Renaissance Humanism," "American Historical Review" 101,1(Feb. 1996), 107-144.

Footnotes

External links

* [http://www.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-baron.htm On Machiavelli]