 Baron’s reconstruction of civic humanism was not only directed against other-worldly values and notions of medieval deference, but also against different modes of construing modernity in terms of the autonomy of the self. At issue here, beyond the characterization of a historical period, was the definition and evaluation of modernity itself. Baron wished to see the autonomous humanity he perceived emerging in quattrocento Florence integrated within a constitutional frame and anchored by patriotic attachment to the community. Baron advocated a vast scholarly program to establish the Italian humanist tradition as a major source of modernity. The polities he posited as commendable are not conceived as formal frames of individual life goals—in other words, empty liberalism—but textured wholes into which human autonomy is woven. To state it somewhat anachronistically, accepting the nexus of public solidarity embedded in civic humanism, and viewing it as an equivalent of civil society, Baron’s thesis overlaps considerably with today’s communitarianism.