 Ironically, in Pocock’s adaptation of Baron’s thesis, virtue is opposed to property, and it is the urban, bourgeois entrepreneurs and the chancery of the modernizing state, the very creators of civic humanism in Baron’s mind, that reside on the wrong side of the fence. Baron’s civic humanists advocated a departure from the medieval ideals of contemplation and asceticism to assert an active life that included trade and profit (Jurdjevic 2001: 727–728). In the Pocockean version of republicanism, civic virtue is opposed to a vision of citizenship that embraces the private pursuit of gain. This kind of virtuous polity cannot, however, be Florence—and certainly not Baron’s Florence—the palazzi of which were built with the profits of banking, manufacturing, international trade, and interest on the city’s public debt. Pocock’s rearward glance to Aristotle (and even Skinner’s to Rome) did not take into account the historical realities of the Renaissance Italian cities, Florence in particular.