Hans Baron

Hans Baron (June 22, 1900 – November 26, 1988) was a German-American historian of political thought and literature. His main contribution to historiography was coining the term civic humanism, an anglicization of the original German term bürgerhumanismus. He was born in Berlin, Germany into a German Jewish family and left Germany in 1933 after the rise of Adoph Hitler to national political power.

Baron studied with the liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch.

He lived in Chicago, Illinois, where he was employed as a librarian and bibliographer at the Newberry Library from 1949 to 1965. He was also a Distinguished Research Fellow at Newberry until 1970, and held a teaching appointment at the University of Chicago for many of those years. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.