Sociology of the Renaissance - Softcover

Freidheim, Elizabeth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1412856868 ISBN 13: 9781412856867

Publisher: Routledge, 2015

Synopsis

This classic work marks the culmination of a definite stage in the socio-economic historiography from the late Middle Ages to the rise of the haute bourgeoisie in the early Renaissance. Here Alfred von Martin attempts to discover and define the spirit or essence of the Renaissance, and with it the spirit of early capitalism as it arose in Florence.

His analysis focuses on the capitalist haute bourgeois who represented the economically, politically, and culturally dominant class of the Renaissance. As he shows, eventually its decline brings about a new stasis in the aristocratization of the great bourgeoisie as well as the rise of despotism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The shift from an agricultural to a commercial economy was unquestionably one of the essential elements in the transition from medieval to Renaissance civilization. This book’s republication is a welcome development and will make this classic accessible again to scholars of the Renaissance and Renaissance humanism. In addition to its new introduction, it also includes a bibliography of von Martin’s extensive writings.

About this title

About the Author

Alfred von Martin (1882-1979) was a German sociologist and distinguished cultural historian
known for his work on the sociology of the bourgeoisie.

Review

“It is good news that Alfred von Martin's classic essay on the sociology of the Renaissance is in print once again, and even better news that it comes accompanied by a perceptive introduction by Gertrud Lenzer, who replaces the essay in its historical context but also points to its enduring value for sociologists as well as for historians.”

—Peter Burke, Cambridge University

“Now that the scholarly world is once again discussing the origins and trajectory of capitalism, Gertrud Lenzer has done us a great service in offering us a new and explanatory version of von Martin’s original and important, and unfortunately neglected, contribution to the general debate.”

—Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University

"Alfred von Martin’s Sociology of the Renaissance has long been a touchpoint for historians of the Renaissance. Since its first publication in German in 1932 and sole English translation in 1944, it has provided a counterweight, briefer in scope but more grounded in material reality, to Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), offering a brilliant analysis of that era’s intellectual and, it might be said, spiritual identity. For that reason alone, its republication now, after the succeeding eight decades of prodigious scholarly exploration of the many dimensions of the Renaissance, is greatly welcome. Yet,  however great is the importance of Sociology of the Renaissance as a pioneering work in the domain of Renaissance studies, it is even greater in another: the attempt to understand the conflicted relationship between intellectual culture and political crisis. The book was published, as Gertrud Lenzer observes in her masterful introduction to the new edition, in response to the Nazi takeover: as a “warning to Germany ... about the dangers of despotism and tyranny told metaphorically by way of [von Martin’s] study of the Renaissance”; and in that spirit was published in English translation twelve years later in London by another great twentieth-century intellectual, the Jewish sociologist Karl Mannheim, who had been targeted by that regime. Set in that framework, von Martin’s work looms large indeed as a key to the century past and to our own era, which once again sees the humanities, and humanity itself, in crisis."

—Margaret L. King, Brooklyn College, CUNY

“Gertrud Lenzer’s preface not only resurrects a great and pioneering classic in the social history of the Renaissance but also offers an analysis of one of the founding authors of early twentieth- century social thought, along with Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and Werner Sombart. Going beyond the political history associated with Ranke and cultural history with Burckhardt, Alfred von Martin (Lenzer’s own teacher and friend ) presents a post- (and non-) Marxian analysis of early modern class structure in its relation to humanist thought and culture. The subject is “the Renaissance and the spirit of capitalism,” and it is joined to an explanation of the relations between the “new elite of merchants and bankers, new modes of thought, the flourishing of the natural sciences, new developments in the arts and in the arts” and the mentality of the bourgeoisie in its association with the humanist intelligentsia. For von Martin this analysis also threw light on early twentieth-century society in crisis in the times of the Weimar Republic and Hitler. Lenzer’s presentation is a brilliant performance, entirely worthy of her great forebear.”

—Donald Kelley, Rutgers University

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1412856868
• ISBN 13: 9781412856867
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 162