Although widely and commonly confused with republicanism civic humanism forms a separate and distinct phenomenon in the history of Western political thought Republicanism is a political philosophy that defends a concept of freedom as nondomination and identifies the institutions that protect it Pettit 1999 In particular republicanism stands against two alternative theories of politics The first is despotism especially as manifested in any form of oneman rule a republic is selfgoverning and so are its denizens The second is liberalism which posits the primacy of the autonomous individual visàvis public order and government the republican values civic engagement in order to realize a form of liberty achievable only in and through the community Republican theorists sometimes refer to writings by historically antecedent authors such as Aristotle or Machiavelli but their concern is not primarily accurate interpretation Rather to the extent that they show an interest in the past it is as a source of ideas that they find useful By contrast civic humanism is a historiographical construct As conventionally employed by scholars the term refers to a group of thinkers who emerged during the period of the Italian Renaissance especially in Florence and who were committed to public engagement in theory as well as practice and whose values were fundamentally antithetical to the medieval past The “invention” of civic humanism is primarily associated with Hans Baron 1900–1988 the famed GermanAmerican historian Fubini 1992 Although he first used the phrase in its original German form Bürgerhumanismus as early as 1925 its popularity stems from the publication in 1955 of his classic book The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny revised 1966 In this volume as well as in later writings that built upon it many collected in Baron 1968 and 1988 he developed what has come to be called the “Baron thesis” Witt 1996 Hankins 1995 Baron was not however the first scholar to propose the form of humanism that emerged during the fifteenth century in the Italian cities mainly promoted the civic vita activa rather than the literary and philological pursuits ordinarily ascribed to the humanists In two books from 1952 and 1954 written and published in Italian Eugenio Garin defended a position almost identical to that of Baron’s Renaissance humanism especially as propounded in Florence reflects a pronounced shift from the emphasis on contemplation typical of the Middle Ages to the priority of civil action to attain a common good Garin 1947 1965 If not for purely contingent reasons the historiographical label for civic humanism might readily have been “the Garin thesis” In the present context it should be noted that some advocates of civic humanism were disposed toward republicanism but the latter is not entailed by the former