Huizinga and the Emergence of the United States as a Reference Culture

This paper will place the Johan Huizinga’s assessment of American civilization in a wider context of European constructions of the United New World as a reference culture. Reference cultures are mental constructs or “cognitive maps” that do not necessarily represent geopolitical realities, but are culturally conditioned images of trans-national models that are typically established and negotiated in public discourse over a long period of time.

From the end of the nineteenth century on the United States slowly emerged as such a point of reference in European public debates, competing with or even replacing other dominant cultural forces such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Huizinga’s publications about the United States, both his first mental exploration of 1918, Mensch en menigte in America (Man and the Masses in America), and his more informed appraisal of 1926, Amerika Levend en Denkend(America: A Dutch Historian's Vision, from Afar and Near) are canonical examples of the intellectual assessment of the United States as an emerging cultural model. They are also advance-guard engagements with the “contested modernization” of the Netherlands in which the United States would play a central role.

When he took the measurements of American civilization, Huizinga was exploring concerns about the future of Western civilization that he would later fully develop into his 1935 cultural pessimist bestseller In de schaduwen van morgen (In the Shadow of Tomorrow) and Homo Ludens.  The emergence of United States confronted Huizinga with the fundamental question what civilization meant in the modern world.