Network analysis is one of the most promising currents in sociological research, and yet it has never been subjected to a theoretically informed assessment and critique. This article outlines the theoretical presuppositions of network analysis. It also distinguishes between three different (implicit) models in the network literature of the interrelations of social structure, culture, and human agency. It concludes that only a strategy for historical explanation that synthesizes social structural and cultural analysis can adequately explain the formation, reproduction, and transformation of networks themselves. The article sketches the broad contours of such a theoretical synthesis in the conclusion.

Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency

We analyze the centralization of political parties and elite networks that underlay the birth of the Renaissance state in Florence. Class revolt and fisical crisis were the ultimate causes of elite consolidation, but Medicean political control was produced by means of network disjunctures within the elite, which the Medici alone spanned. Cosimo de' Medici's multivocal identity as sphinx harnessed the power available in these network holes and resolved the contradiction between judge and boss inherent in all organizations. Methodologically, we argue that to understand state formation one must penetrate beneath the veneer of formal institutions, groups, and goals down to the relational substrata of peoples' actual lives. Ambiguity and heterogeneity, not planning and self- interest, are the raw materials of which powerful states and persons are constructed.

http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~snijders/PadgettAnsell1993.pdf

Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434'

Introduction 1. Models for the memory 2. Descriptions of the neuropsychology of memory 3. Elementary memory design 4. The arts of memory 5. Memory and the ethics of reading 6. Memory and authority 7. Memory and the book Afterword Appendixes List of abbreviations Bibliography.

The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture

Follow up what we will offer in this article about the waning of the middle ages. You know really that this book is coming as the best seller book today. So, when you are really a good reader or you're fans of the author, it does will be funny if you don't have this book. It means that you have to get this book. For you who are starting to learn about something new and feel curious about this book, it's easy then. Just get this book and feel how this book will give you more exciting lessons.

The waning of the Middle Ages

Volume I: General Introduction Acknowledgments Notes on the text 1. Introduction: seeing things their way 2. The practice of history and the cult of the fact 3. Interpretation, rationality and truth 4. Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas 5. Motives, intentions and interpretation 6. Interpretation and the understanding of speech acts 7. 'Social meaning' and the explanation of social action 8. Moral principles and social change 9. The idea of a cultural lexicon 10. Retrospect: Studying rhetoric and conceptual change. Volume II. 1. Introduction 2. The rediscovery of republican values 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government 4. Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics 5. Republican virtues in an age of princes 6. Machiavelli on virtu and the maintenance of liberty 7. The idea of negative liberty: Machiavelli and modern perspectives 8. Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility 9. Was there a Calvinist theory of revolution? 10. Moral ambiguity and the renaissance art of eloquence 11. John Milton and the politics of slavery 12. Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war 13. From the state of princes to the modern state 14. Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought. Volume III: 1. Introduction: Hobbes's career in philosophy 2. Hobbes and the studia humanitatis 3. Hobbes's changing conception of a civil science 4. Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality 5. Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state 6. Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty 7. Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter 8. History and ideology in the English revolution 9. The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation 10. Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy 11. Hobbes and his disciples in France and England 12. Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society 13. Hobbes's last word on politics.

https://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/13686/frontmatter/9780521813686_frontmatter.pdf

Visions of Politics

REVISED, ONE-VOLUME EDITION, WITH AN EPILOGUE By HANS BARON. In this revised one-volume edition, the author has condensed the longer notes and added new ones, while leaving the original numbering intact, so the interested scholar may still refer to volume two of the first edition. New findings from archival and manuscript sources strengthen many points. The chapters on the political background of the changes in culture and thought as well as those dealing with \"The Dangers of Humanist Classicism,\" and \"Humanism and Classicism\" are enlarged and an epilogue has been added. 600 Pages, $10.00 (Paperback) $2.95T

The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny

The crisis of the early Italian Renaissance

Hans Baron was one of the many great German emigre scholars whose work Princeton brought into the Anglo-American world. His Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance has provoked more discussion and inspired more research than any other twentieth-century study of the Italian Renaissance. Baron's book was the first historical synthesis of politics and humanism at that momentous critical juncture when Italy passed from medievalism to the thought of the Renaissance. Baron, unlike his peers, married culture and politics; he contended that to truly understand the Renaissance one must understand the rise of humanism within the political context of the day. This marked a significant departure for the field and one that changed the direction of Renaissance studies. Moreover, Baron's book was one of the first major attempts of any sort to ground intellectual history in a fully realized historical context and thus stands at the very origins of the interdisciplinary approach that is now the core of Renaissance studies. Baron's analysis of the forces that changed life and thought in fifteenth-century Italy was widely reviewed domestically and internationally, and scholars quickly noted that the book "will henceforth be the starting point for any general discussion of the early Renaissance." The Times Literary Supplement called it "a model of the kind of intensive study on which all understanding of cultural process must rest." First published in 1955 in two volumes, the work was reissued in a one-volume Princeton edition in 1966.

The crisis of the early Italian Renaissance : civic humanism and republican liberty in an age of classicism and tyranny

The Description for this book, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought. Volume 2, will be forthcoming.

Hans Baron

Papers

The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny

The crisis of the early Italian Renaissance

The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny

The crisis of the early Italian Renaissance : civic humanism and republican liberty in an age of classicism and tyranny

In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, Volume 2: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought