Hans Baron

Hans Baron (June 22, 1900 – November 26, 1988)[1] was a German American 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).[2]

Contents

Life and career

Born in Berlin of a Jewish family, Baron was a student of the liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch.[3] After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he left Germany, first for Italy and England, then in 1938 for the United States. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945.[4] 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 Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan 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 at the hands of Milan, some Florentine thinkers began to think otherwise. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.[5]

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

Footnotes

  1. ^ "Hans Baron". Social Security Death Index. New Historic Genealogical Society. http://www.americanancestors.org/PageDetail.aspx?recordId=63488866. Retrieved May 17, 2011. 
  2. ^ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; 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."
  3. ^ Georg G. Iggers, "Refugee Historians from Nazi Germany," p. 10.
  4. ^ "Hans Baron". U.S. Naturalization Records Indexes, 1794-1995. Ancestry.com. http://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?ti=0&indiv=try&db=usnaturalizationindexes&h=1158079. Retrieved May 17, 2011. "Name: Hans Baron; Age: 45; Birth Date: 22 Jun 1900; Issue Date: 29 Jan 1945; State: Massachusetts; Locality, Court: District of Massachusetts, District Court" (subscription required)
  5. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterB.pdf. Retrieved May 17, 2011. 

References

External links