Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434
1993/05/01 by John F. Padgett, Christopher K. Ansell, Christopher Ansell · 2,272 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Ambiguity #Computer science #Consolidation (business) #Contradiction #Culture, Economy, and Development Studies #Economics #Elite #Epistemology #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Law #Philosophy #Political action #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Social and Cultural Dynamics #Sociology #State (computer science)
paper · doi:10.1086/230190
published in American Journal of Sociology 98(6), 1259-1319 (University of Chicago Press)
openalex publication_date 1993/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Abstract
Abstract This chapter examines the centralization of political power and elite networks in Renaissance Florence that underlie the birth of the Florentine state. It details how class revolt and fiscal crisis trigger elite consolidation while Cosimo de’ Medici exploits network disjuncture to navigate the inherent contradiction between judge and boss. The chapter presents a rigorous analysis of interwoven marriage, economic, and patronage ties that structure the Medici party and reshape traditional oligarchic factionalism. It demonstrates that political parties emerge from heterogeneous networks and relational dynamics rather than from uniform, self-contained social groups. Finally, the chapter illustrates that the Medici mobilize fragmented elite alliances into a cohesive, centralized power structure that decisively shapes Florentine political order.
Citations
Cited by
- What Is Agency?
- Embeddedness in the Making of Financial Capital: How Social Relations and Networks Benefit Firms Seeking Financing
- The Small World of Germany and the Durability of National Networks
- Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence
- Trust Thy Crooked Neighbor
- Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy
- Unpacking the Institutional Complexity in Adoption of CSR Practices in Multinational Enterprises
- Of Pride and Prejudice: The Role of Sociology and Social Networks in Integrating the Health Sciences
- Verfolgungsnetzwerke
- The Meaning of Merit: Talent versus Hard Work Legitimacy
- Weaponized Interdependence: How Global Economic Networks Shape State Coercion
- Mapping Political-Elite Networks in Europe with a Multilingual Joint Entity-Relation Extraction Pipeline
- The Structure and Function of Complex Networks
- Contributor Influence in Congress: Social Ties and PAC Effects on U.S. House Policymaking
- Centralized "big science" communities more likely generate non-replicable results
- Family Ties, Social Control, and Authoritarian Distribution to Elites
- Computational structuralism: Toward a formal theory of meaning in the age of digital intelligence
- The Atlas for the Aspiring Network Scientist
- The State and the Emergence of the First American Party System: Roll Call Voting in the New York State Assembly during the Early Republic
- Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System
- When Serving the Public Interest Generates Private Gains: Private Actor Governance and Two-Sided Digital Markets
- Interlegislator Relations and Policy Making: A Sociological Study of Roll‐Call Voting in a State Legislature1
- Thresholds and Fluctuations of Submultiplexes in Random Multiplex Networks
- Generalized Friendship Paradoxes in Network Science
- What properties of culture should we measure?
- Network ecology: Tie fitness in social context(s)
- Entrepreneurship in and around institutional voids: A case study from Bangladesh
- Sampling Random Graphs with Specified Degree Sequences
- Intergenerational mobility across nine generations: Evidence from Poland, 1800–1984
- Many a Slip: The Challenge of Impact as Boundary Object in Social Finance
- Multiplexons: Limits of Multiplex Networks
- Status symbols in world politics
- The Evolution of Interpersonal Relationships in a Social Group
- Marrying for power: Gendered alliances in mafias
- Decoding Culture: Tools for Behavioral Strategists
- In the Shadows of Great Men: Retired Leaders and Informal Power Constraints in Autocracies
- Layer aggregation and reducibility of multilayer interconnected networks
- Spherical latent space models for social network analysis
- Comparing the Implications of Strategies for Governing the COVID ‐19 Pandemic for the Political Robustness of Five European Political Regimes
- An introduction to exponential random graph (p*) models for social networks
- The structure and dynamics of multilayer networks
- Social Media Information Operations
- Theorizing social networks: the relational sociology of and around Harrison White
- Bayesian inference for exponential random graph models
- A Method for Group Extraction and Analysis in Multilayer Social Networks
- Multi-layered Social Networks
- Quotegraph: A Social Network Extracted from Millions of News Quotations
- Reclaiming the social: relationalism in anglophone international studies
- Lottery-Based Elections, Power Monopolization, and Urban Development: The Case of Swiss City-States, 1666–1794
- The Web of Group Affiliations Revisited: Social Life, Postmodernism, and Sociology
- A clan detector algorithm to identify independent clans in the kinship networks of elite family dynasties
- Vulnerability and power on networks
- Experimentation in Wicked Situations: How activists construct pragmatic action frames
- Critical Nodes In Directed Networks
- Aleatoric governance: using lotteries to break the iron law of oligarchy
- Understanding the Effect of Knowledge Graph Extraction Error on Downstream Graph Analyses: A Case Study on Affiliation Graphs
- Hasidic Dynasties: Geosocial Patterns of Marriage Strategies
- Les habits neufs du néo-institutionnalisme ? La redécouverte de l’ordre mésologique et de l’ agency
- A measure of betweenness centrality based on random walks
- Status in flux: Unequal alliances can create power vacuums
- Knowledge and Networks
- Axioms for Centrality
- In the Network of the Conclave: Social Connections and the Making of a Pope
- Legitimation Strategies in International Hierarchies
- Overcoming Tight Constraints in Soft Happy Colouring
- Experiences creating three implementations of the repast agent modeling toolkit
- Modeling Human Behavior in a Strategic Network Game with Complex Group Dynamics
- Controlling the Chinese Media: An Uncertain Business
- Community Detection in the Network of German Princes in 1225: a Case Study
- Open Elite? Social Mobility, Marriage, and Family in Florence, 1282–1494
- Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis
- Scientific collaboration networks. II. Shortest paths, weighted networks, and centrality
- Ranking in interconnected multilayer networks reveals versatile nodes
- Caveat Emptor: The Construction of Nonprofit Consumer Watchdog Organizations
- Exogenous Shocks, the Criminal Elite, and Increasing Gender Inequality in Chicago Organized Crime
- Organizing Insurgency: Networks, Resources, and Rebellion in South Asia
- Tackling Grand Challenges Pragmatically: Robust Action Revisited
- Analysis of Neighbourhoods in Multi-layered Dynamic Social Networks
- Cosimo de' Medici [wikipedia]
- The Likoma Network Study: Context, data collection, and initial results. [europepmc]
- Great cities look small. [europepmc]
- Computational Psychometrics Meets Hollywood: The Complexity in Emotional Storytelling. [europepmc]
- Brain multiplexes reveal morphological connectional biomarkers fingerprinting late brain dementia states. [europepmc]
- Multilink communities of multiplex networks. [europepmc]
- Applying the robust adaptation planning (RAP) framework to Ghana's agricultural climate change adaptation regime. [europepmc]
- Quantifying layer similarity in multiplex networks: a systematic study. [europepmc]
- A change of perspective in network centrality. [europepmc]
- Game theoretical inference of human behavior in social networks. [europepmc]
- Open Campus Policies: How Built, Food, Social, and Organizational Environments Matter for Oregon's Public High School Students' Health. [europepmc]
- Embedding the intrinsic relevance of vertices in network analysis: the case of centrality metrics. [europepmc]
- Construction, comparison and evolution of networks in life sciences and other disciplines. [europepmc]
- Estimating international trade status of countries from global liner shipping networks. [europepmc]
- The roots of the Columbian Exchange: an entanglement and network approach to early Caribbean encounter transactions. [europepmc]
- Modelling transitions between egalitarian, dynamic leader and absolutist power structures. [europepmc]
- A spatial interaction incorporated betweenness centrality measure. [europepmc]
- A dataset of dynamical social map in ancient China: 618-1644. [europepmc]
- Local Phase Transitions in a Model of Multiplex Networks with Heterogeneous Degrees and Inter-Layer Coupling. [europepmc]
- Is 'distinctiveness centrality' actually distinctive? A comment on Fronzetti Colladon and Naldi (2020). [europepmc]
- Evolution of cooperation in multichannel games on multiplex networks. [europepmc]
- Marrying for power: Gendered alliances in mafias. [europepmc]
Related