Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought

Extract

Jacob Burckhardt's Social and Political Thought, Richard Sigurdson, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, xii, pp. 279.

Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) has long been recognized as one of the most important historians of the nineteenth century. His principal works, The Age of Constantine the Great (1852) and The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), and his posthumous Greek Cultural History (1902) and Reflections on History (1905), remain in print and continue to be read and studied with profit today. Indeed, the questions raised in his study of the Italian Renaissance still define how historians interpret this field of history.