Francesca Trivellato: “Jacob Burckhardt and the Economic Historians of Renaissance Florence: A Missed Encounter”

In his landmark 1860 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt identified individualism as a hallmark of the Italian Renaissance. During the decades to come, several modern social theorists, and Max Weber in particular, elevated individualism to a defining trait of modern capitalism. But the individualism that Burckhardt and Weber evoked meant different things. This talk will explore the implications of this difference, which has so far gone unacknowledged, for the economic and business history of Renaissance Florence. Borrowing from Trivellato’s work in progress, it will also suggest alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between the family and the firm, a topic that has long polarized the scholarship on Renaissance Florence.