Unlike Tocqueville, however, Huizinga tends to emphasize the directly economic character of political life in the United States, noting for example the way in which the notions of the “boss” and “the machine” assumed a significant place in late 19th- and early 20th-century urban politics. In contrast to Tocqueville, he argues that there was new sort of feudalism that had come into existence in the United States, one suffused with status and hierarchy, and characterized by a new form of personalistic dependency – dependency on the economic as well as on the political boss. He stresses the role of individualism in American life, but often sees it as being undermined by increasingly oppressive economic structures.
Observing and writing about the United States 100 years after Tocqueville, Huizinga is in a position to describe the outcome of many of the processes that his predecessor had intuited, but is less sanguine about the outcome and about its consequences for Europeans. A good deal of Huizinga’s thinking about the United States is shaped by the concept of “rationalization,” which, although he never mentions Weber, seems derived largely from Weber’s lexicon. Huizinga tends to see this rationalization as irrational, anticipating Horkheimer and Adorno’s “dialectic of enlightenment” and their critical attitudes toward American culture.
