Burckhardt was the most renowned of the historians of the nineteenth century to predict, with astonishing accuracy, the totalitarian direction that history could take -- and which history in fact did take in the twentieth century. It was in his letters, rather than in his lectures or longer works, that Burckhardt most directly addressed the currents of intellectual thought and social and political order -- or disorder -- of Europe in the nineteenth century. It was in his letters, for instance, that he warned that these currents portended the rise of a new kind of demagogue unique to the...

The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is an 1860 work on the Italian Renaissance by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Together with his History of the Renaissance in Italy (1867) it is counted among the classics of Renaissance historiography.