 One important extension of Baron’s position has been proposed by John Pocock (1975). Pocock takes Renaissance civic humanism to be an estimable manifestation of republican and patriotic collective sentiment. For Pocock as well as Baron, civic humanism must be considered the response to a crisis amounting to what Machiavelli would call an occasione, a moment of disorder that gives scope to the formative activity of a new beginning that nevertheless looks to the past in order to guide its future. The dilemma faced by Florentine civic humanists, according to Pocock, was to fit the idea of an Aristotelian polis within the framework of a Christian understanding of time. One answer to the experience of disorder was the explicitly millenarian exaltation of the leader of Florence’s republic from 1494–1498, the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola. In Pocock’s view, civic humanism provided a secular alternative to Savanarola’s prophetic republicanism, in the form of a revived Aristotelian “science of virtue” as the means of overcoming the republic’s temporal finitude. Given doubts that have been raised with regard to the philosophical depth of the supposed Aristotelianism of the Florentine humanists, another recent scholar of civic humanism, Quentin Skinner has, as an alternative, stressed its Roman rather than Hellenic antecedents (Bock, Skinner, &amp; Viroli 1990: 121–141). This is not just a matter of identifying sources. Skinner’s revised position means rather that in his view, civic humanism advocated active citizenship as a means to liberty from foreign and domestic domination, rather than as a self-fulfilling human end. In more recent times, Skinner has shifted his position from an historical claim to an entirely philosophical one, in line with the purely theoretical conception of republicanism discussed above (e.g., Skinner 1998).