Related: Johan Huizinga On The Need For A Spiritual Regeneration of The Individual And A Rebirth of Humanity.
Johan Huizinga (7 December 1872 – 1 February 1945) was a Dutch historian and one of the founders of modern cultural history.
Alarmed by the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Huizinga wrote several works of cultural criticism. Many similarities can be noted between his analysis and that of contemporary critics such as Ortega y Gasset and Oswald Spengler. Huizinga argued that the spirit of technical and mechanical organisation had replaced spontaneous and organic order in cultural as well as political life.
An excerpt from, "The Eternal Huizinga" By Birger Vanwesenbeeck, Los Angeles Review of Books, February 7, 2021:
Formally, too, there are strong resemblances between Huizinga’s notoriously florid style and the works of fin-de-siècle writers such as Rodenbach and Huysmans, so that at times one feels tempted to read Autumntide itself as a late-late addition to the “overripe tree” of Decadent literature more so than as a historiographical study. To do so, however, would be to misrecognize both the deep originality of the book and the impeccable scholarship that it displays on almost every page. But it is worth pointing out that Huizinga’s book owes far more of its continuing relevance and fame to its inimitable style, which has moved readers for the last century, than to its insights about the rather arcane subject of late-medieval life. But then Huizinga’s approach to the late-medieval period in Autumntide exhibits neither the exclusively economic focus of Marxism, which by the early 20th century had gradually become the predominant paradigm among historians, nor the nationalist models of the 19th century, which, like the 1902 exhibit, sought to force the sprawling geopolitical structures of the medieval world into the straitjacket of the modern nation-state. Tellingly, neither the term Flemish Primitives nor the moniker “early Netherlandish art” appears in Autumntide. For as much as the late-medieval era constituted a unified whole, it also straddled the boundaries of the contemporary nation-states of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
An excerpt from, "Johan Huizinga: Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History" By Nick Nielsen, December 7, 2021:
What follows is a paragraph from one of Huizinga’s lesser known essays, “A Definition of the Concept of History” (translated by D. R. Cousin), which appeared in Philosophy and History: The Ernst Cassirer Festschrift, edited by Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (1963). The definition of history upon which Huizinga converges is this: “History is the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past.” Leading up to this definition we find the following:
“It remains for us to establish who renders account to himself, and of what. To the question about the subject which concerns itself with history, the answer is implicit in what has just been said. It can only be a civilization, inasmuch as that word is best adapted to indicate the ideal totalities of social life and creative activity realized in a definite time and place which for our thinking constitute the units in the historical life of mankind. We are expected to speak of a civilization, no less than of a people, a society as a thinking subject, without falling by the use of this metaphor into the gross anthropomorphism which constitutes one of the chief dangers to historical thought. Moreover, it is hardly necessary to define the concept of civilization more precisely than has just been done, until we employ the word as a term in a definition. Every civilization creates its own form of history, and must do so. The character of the civilization determines what history shall mean to it, and of what kind it shall be. If a civilization coincides with a people, a state, a tribe, its history will be correspondingly simple. If a general civilization is differentiated into distinct nations, and these again into groups, classes, parties, the corresponding differentiation in the historical form follows of itself.6 The historical interests of every sectional civilization are determined by the question: what are the things which ‘matter’ to it? Civilization has a meaning only as a process of adaptation to an end; it is a teleological concept, as history is an explicitly purposive knowing.”
Video Title: Autumn of the Middle Ages: A Century Later. Source: European Institute. Date Published: November 22, 2016. Description:
Interviews with
Martha Howell: Miriam Champion Professor of History, Columbia University
Marc Boone: Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Ghent University
Peter Arnade: Dean of the College of Arts & Humanities, University of Hawai'i Manoa
After a workshop on Johan Huizinga's "Autumn of the Middle Ages"
Published in 1919, Johan Huizinga’s Herfsttij der middeleeuwen (Autumn of the Middle Ages) is a historiographical classic that still stands as a touchstone for studies of the late medieval Low Countries. On the eve of the book's centenary, Columbia University's Dutch Studies Program hosted a workshop of scholars in history, literature and art history to assess Huizinga’s arguments, their impact on subsequent scholarship, and how two generations of research have updated or refuted them. The workshop took place on November 10, 2016 at Flanders House New York.
