Expressions of the Self in Burckhardt’s Renaissance

This chapter revisits Jacob Burckhardt’s seminal contention that the Italian Renaissance witnessed the birth of the modern individual. It does so by examining both the book’s genesis and its legacy in the historiography of the last half-century. The Civilization of the Renaissance is here considered primarily as the work of a practising historian, on three levels: theoretically, as a reflection of Burckhardt’s complex, unresolved engagement with the philosophy of history—particularly that of Hegel—and with historicism; methodologically, as an attempt at an unmediated observation of the past; and interpretively, as the discovery in Renaissance Italy of the cultivation of personality, individualism, and ‘indiscipline’—that is, the emancipation from social, political, and cultural forces. Modern historiography has criticized Burckhardt on all these points and moved in different, even opposite directions. Nevertheless, Burckhardt’s quest for the individual may yet offer inspiration to those interested in pushing back the boundaries of determinacy in history.