Hans Baron argued that from Salutati to Ficino, humanists in Florence were identified with the wealthy ruling families, shared the interests of those families, and developed a positive evaluation of social activity. Such a development was only possible in a republic; humanists who patronized the courts of despots were contemptuous of the business enterprises of the Florentine burgher and extolled the life of leisure. Thus, civic humanism cannot be separated from Florence’s republican political tradition, for it could have developed in no other environment.

Bruni’s apology for wealth rediscovered the civic character of Aristotle’s Politics, and the positive evaluation of wealth in Aristotle’s Ethics. Humanists in Florence and elsewhere began to echo to the desire to rediscover Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, which was the most kindly disposed of all classical works regarding the acquisition of wealth. Florence humanists also cultivated positive attitudes toward Seneca and Cicero.

Baron thus established his thesis that the transformation we call the Renaissance that occurred in early quattrocento Florence applied not only to the history of art but also to the humanist movement. But the question remains: what caused this transformation? Why was there suddenly a new appreciation for the positive values of wealth and of Cicero the philosopher statesman? When did civic humanism truly develop? In his major work on the subject, published in 1955, Baron ascribed the cause was Florence’s conflict with Milan, culminating in a war fought between 1400 – 1402 in which Florence avoided defeat by the Milanese.

To the humanists, Florence had become the city of freedom. This view is nowhere more evident than in Bruni’s Panegyric to the City of Florence and his second Dialogue to Peter Paul Vergerius. In the latter, he raised for the first time questions about Dante’s interpretation of Caesar and the assassins Brutus and Cassius.

Bruni also argued in Dialogue Two that the republic had given rise to men of great talent in many fields, but that “after the republic had been subjected to the power of one man, those brilliant minds vanished as Cornlis Tacitus says.”

Baron argues that this change in political preference from monarchy to republic involved a deeper underlying change in intellectual vision. In other words, the humanism that emerged in Florence could only have emerged under the conditions of a free city state. As a result, this new Florentine civic humanism became the standard interpretation for all humanism during the quattrocento.