Hans Baron (June 22, 1900 – November 26, 1988)[1] was a German-American historian of political thought and literature.
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] Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, Baron was a student of the liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch.
[6] 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.
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.