Huizinga on America

Approximately a decade ago, Claus Offe wrote a small book – which had originated as his 2003 Adorno lectures – on the views of European sojourners in America and their respective views. The authors discussed were Tocqueville, Weber, and, his own teacher, Frankfurt critical theorist Theodor Adorno. Writing at about the time that the Bush administration and its “coalition of the willing” invaded Iraq, Offe concluded his book with a few of his own reflections as a frequent visitor to the country, noting that none of his distinguished predecessors had experienced the United States as the world’s unchallengeable military force. As of 2003, Offe (2005) argued, the self-appointed American mission to bring democracy to the rest of the world had come to serve as a mask for “an identity-building obsession, through which the inner cracks of American society are covered up with military means directed toward the outside world” (p. 100). Alone in its ability to dominate the world militarily, the United States had abandoned its previous commitment to international law and presumed to decide for itself when and where it would abide by such law, even to the point of making torture a matter of policy. Several years on, however, the expenditures needed to sustain that military façade, combined with a profligate “irrational exuberance” in the trading of exotic financial derivatives, brought the United States nearly to its knees in the Great Recession of 2008 – the worst economic crisis in the country in 75 years. In part as a result, the United States under Barack Obama has been forced to moderate its military expenditures and to avoid further military entanglements, especially in the Islamic world.

Against this backdrop, it seems appropriate to add another illustrious but little-appreciated name to the roster of trenchant European commentators on the United States: the famed Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga. This article considers Huizinga’s writings on the United States against the background of his most influential predecessors in this genre: Alexis de Tocqueville and Max Weber. Like Tocqueville, Huizinga writes extensively about the importance of associationalism in American life and politics, devoting an entire chapter to “Individualism and Association.” Unlike Tocqueville, however, Huizinga (1972) tends to emphasize the directly economic character of political life in the United States, noting, for example, the way in which the economically derived notions of the “boss” and “the machine” (p. 104) assumed a significant place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American urban politics. In contrast to Tocqueville and Weber, who stressed the democratic character of the United States, Huizinga argues that a new sort of feudalism had come into existence there, 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. Huizinga stresses the role of individualism in American life, but often sees it as being undermined by increasingly remote, oppressive economic structures. Observing and writing about the United States 100 years after Tocqueville but soon after Weber’s death, Huizinga is in a position to describe the outcome of many of the processes that his predecessors had intuited. Whereas Weber thought that the United States was being “Europeanised,” Huizinga fears what American developments mean for Europeans. A good deal of Huizinga’s thinking about the United States is shaped by the concept of “rationalisation” (or at least “mechanisation”), which, although he never mentions Weber, nonetheless seems derived largely from Weber’s lexicon. However, Huizinga tends to see this rationalization as irrational, anticipating Horkheimer and Adorno’s “dialectic of enlightenment” and their critical attitudes toward American culture.

It need hardly be said that Alexis de Tocqueville (2000 [1835/1840]) found in the United States of the early 1830s an “equality of conditions” that was its most striking feature, and one that was a harbinger of a broader “democratic revolution” taking place throughout the “Christian universe” (pp. 3, 6). Tocqueville also famously noted the tendency of democratic societies, and of American society in particular, toward “individualism,” a narrowing of people’s range of interest in both personal and generational terms. “Aristocratic” society, according to Tocqueville, had been characterized by a chain of relationships across time as well as by bonds of community between lord and serf. “Democracy,” Tocqueville argued, destroyed those relationships, replacing them with more ephemeral shared “interests.” Many sociological commentators would follow this general line of thinking, perhaps most famously in the formulation that “Gemeinschaft” (community) was being replaced in the modern world by “Gesellschaft” (society). Ever with an eye on his native France, Tocqueville regarded the United States as having been blessed with the good fortune of having arrived at a democratic state without having to endure a democratic revolution, to be “born equal without having to become so.”

Max Weber followed Tocqueville’s lead in noting the propensity of Americans to form voluntary associations. For Weber, however, these voluntary associations were secularized versions of the sectarian Protestant groupings that he regarded as the foundation of American social life. Far from the individualistic country that was sometimes portrayed, then, Weber argued that “genuine” American society – its middle and lower classes – never consisted of isolated grains of sand, as Tocqueville’s notion of “individualism” might have suggested. Rather, the individualism that arose from reformed Protestantism “gained a remarkable power to form a community.” Yet, those communities were always particular and unwelcoming to outsiders: they were always “riddled with all kinds of ‘exclusiveness’” (Weber, 2002 [1906]: 212–213). This pattern Weber regarded as a holdover from the Protestant sects and their tendency to require religious “qualification” as the price of admission. Weber foresaw a “Europeanisation” of American life, but this was primarily a matter of the decline of religious engagement rather than of the emergence of class distinctions of the kind generally regarded as more characteristic of post-feudal Europe. The idea that religion would decline in significance in the United States appears to have been a misperception on Weber’s part, although recent rapid increases in the number of “religious nones” may finally be bearing out this part of Weber’s analysis (see Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2012). In any case, like Tocqueville, Weber (1949) tended to emphasize the openness and egalitarianism of the American socio-economic structure:

[I]t would be considered strictly repugnant – wherever the old tradition still prevails – if even the richest “chief,” while playing billiards or cards in his club in the evening, would not treat his “clerk” as in every sense fully his equal in birthright.

For someone whose best-known work was so heavily concentrated in the cultural domain (see especially Huizinga, 1996), what is striking about Huizinga’s writing about the United States is its heavy stress on the economic. In this sense, Huizinga – although hardly a Marxist – observes the United States from a much different perspective than Tocqueville and Weber, who emphasized what they regarded as the distinctively democratic and religious aspects of American life. In a certain sense, Huizinga’s image of the United States as drenched in the economic was his version of “American exceptionalism,” and one senses the familiar haughty air of an “aristocratic” European culture sniffing its nose at the boorish, money-grubbing upstarts across the Atlantic. In these respects, there are similarities with the views of Tocqueville and Weber as well as the aforementioned difference of emphasis.

Huizinga’s view of the United States’ “point of departure,” so central to Tocqueville’s understanding of the American situation, was rather different than that of the Frenchman. From Huizinga’s (1972) Dutch perspective, the American Revolution was, like the Dutch revolt against the Spanish Habsburgs, above all “a conservative revolution – a struggle for the preservation of liberties more than for the conquest of freedom.” Yet in the American case, the “spirit of the Reformation [that had animated the Dutch revolt] had been replaced by that of the Enlightenment” (p. 18). By contrast, Tocqueville more strongly emphasized the Reformation, especially its Puritan elements, as the principal well-spring of the American experiment, pointing to the severe laws governing everyday life and the draconian forms of punishment that Americans chose to impose upon themselves. Tocqueville tended to see the Enlightenment as the source of the evils that he believed permeated the French Revolution. In particular, the Enlightenment encouraged a devotion to abstract ideas that were at odds with the practicalities of governance: “One lost interest in what was, in order to think about what could be, and finally one lived mentally in that ideal city the writers had built” (De Tocqueville, 1998 [1856]: 201).

Chief among the unfortunate tendencies of the Enlightenment, in De Tocqueville’s (2000 [1835/1840]) view, was its irreligion; the United States was blessed by the fact that far from being at odds with one another as they had been in France, “the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom” marched hand-in-hand (p. 43). Weber would later follow Tocqueville in putting sectarian Protestantism at the center of his conception of the distinctiveness of the American social order. The anti-authoritarian characteristics of reformed Protestantism and its promotion of individual self-assertion in business were the crucial features of his way of thinking about the United States (Weber, 2002 [1906]: 212). For Huizinga (1972), the Enlightenment in America

did not combat faith … but only pushed it a little to one side … The great abyss between the godless and the believers did not develop in America. As a consequence, America also missed the great struggle of revenge against the Enlightenment … The American typically assimilated in a remarkably good-natured way his forefathers’ sturdy faith with the more recent ideals of freedom and love of mankind, as well as with matter-of-fact profit seeking in everyday life.

Blinded by his despair about the legacies of the French Revolution, Tocqueville was less inclined to give the Enlightenment such a central role in the American story, even if he was aware of its benevolent influence.

Writing in the days of the Great Gatsby, Huizinga also took Tocqueville explicitly to task for having misunderstood a number of the central features of American social life. The Dutch historian quotes his distinguished predecessor at some length; according to Tocqueville, he says,

the wealthy … are few and powerless; they have no privileges that attract public observation … Great wealth tends to disappear; the number of small fortunes to increase …; extraordinary prosperity and irremediable penury are alike unknown … The ties of race, of rank, and of country are relaxed …

In response, Huizinga (1972) wonders

how was it possible that so clear a thinker as Tocqueville, with his sharp eye for real relationships, could have so mistaken the direction of the great stream flowing before him? The rich scattered and powerless! Minds without vigor! Relaxation of the ties of race, class, and country! Everything seems to have come out exactly opposite.

Huizinga may be being a bit unfair to Tocqueville on the matter of race, at least; after all, Tocqueville devotes approximately one-quarter of Volume 1 of Democracy in America to the problem of the “three races that inhabit the territory of the United States,” and is depressingly cogent about the likely difficulties of achieving racial comity. Huizinga goes on to note that in 1837, at the end of the presidency of populist tribune Andrew Jackson (and shortly after Tocqueville’s journey to the United States), Jackson foresaw not an egalitarian, democratic future for the United States, but “a struggle of the moneyed aristocracy against the democracy of the many; the prosperous people would make honest workmen into hewers of wood and drawers of water by use of the system of credit and commercial paper” (Huizinga, 1972: 62; my italics). In the wake of the Great Recession of 2008, Jackson and Huizinga look considerably more prescient about the economic future of American society than does de Tocqueville.

Huizinga continues this critique by arguing that far from being a “democratic” society, the United States betrays elements of a new form of feudalism. In the feudal system that emerged from the European Middle Ages, owners of land exercised state-like powers over their dependents; politics and economics were closely interwoven. “The danger of a similar development was very great in America,” according to Huizinga (1972), “because until quite recently the state never exercised any very vigorous activity” (p. 86). In the aftermath of the so-called Gilded Age of the late 1800s, which witnessed the development of the large corporation and the emergence of the great economic dynasties, familial wealth had assumed much greater significance than it had had in the earlier age of entrepreneurial capitalism. The period in which Huizinga observed the United States is thus much more similar to our own time, when inequality has grown to levels unseen in 75 years – that is, since the days of the Great Depression. Huizinga (1972) notes that the difference between the earlier feudalism and that which he described in the early twentieth-century United States was that the modern version lacked “the loyalty of the man to his lord, and the solicitude of the lord for his man” (p. 88). In other words, it lacked the “human element” of the older variant, even if he understood that noblesse oblige was largely honored in the breach. Under the conditions of corporate capitalism, however, the “absence of this ethical element” is not a matter of “the evil intentions of persons” but rather of “the impersonal force of organisation itself preventing humanity from developing within the conditions of economic life.” This begins to sound more like Weber’s “iron cage,” echoing Marx’s analysis of capitalism, than Huizinga might have realized.

The fact is, however, that Huizinga – like many readers before and since – may not have read his Tocqueville as closely as he might have. In a frequently overlooked portion of Democracy in America, Tocqueville considered the possible return of “aristocracy” under democratic conditions. In particular, he contrasted the “territorial aristocracy” of old and its notions of noblesse oblige with the new aristocracy arising from industry. Unlike the feudal aristocracy, which would theoretically have been expected to look after its serfs in times of want, “the manufacturing aristocracy of our day, after having impoverished and brutalised the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourished by public charity in times of crisis.” Although De Tocqueville (2000 [1835/1840]) regards this new manufacturing aristocracy as “one of the most restrained and least dangerous” of its kind, he warns that

the friends of democracy ought constantly to turn their regard with anxiety in this direction; for if ever permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy are introduced anew into the world, one can predict that they will enter by this door.

While the manufacturing aristocracy to which Tocqueville points has since been supplanted by a financial and technological elite, we have tended toward a return of that “permanent inequality” that Tocqueville worried about and to which Huizinga points in the period following World War I. In the preface to the 2007 edition of their bestselling critique of American individualism (Bellah et al., 2007), the authors of Habits of the Heart drew on the above passage before warning that “it is the tendency to oligarchy, with its threats to republican liberty, which we believe is today on the rise, especially in the United States.” In short, while Huizinga (1972) was surely correct to say that Tocqueville was “too exclusively a political thinker … without enough understanding of economic factors,” Huizinga may indeed have “judg[ed] too quickly” in dismissing Tocqueville’s appreciation of the changes in human relationships under what later came to be known as capitalism and the prospect of a return of “permanent inequality” under that system (p. 62). Still, and in part because he had a century more of evidence in front of him, Huizinga (1972) was more attuned to the way in which capitalism ultimately developed in the United States, stressing its devotion to the bottom line rather than to producing quality merchandise and satisfied customers: “The first aim of the management of the big corporation is no longer the sound development of the branches of production on which it is based but only the financial interests of the enterprise” (p. 89).

In a manner more reminiscent of Weber than of Tocqueville, however, Huizinga is also struck by the “rationalisation” ¹ of life and of the human being in the United States. The term – or terms like it, such as “mechanisation” – appears extensively in Huizinga’s discussion of the role of the machine in American life. Under the influence of the arch-rationalizer Frederick Winslow Taylor, the inventor of the theory of “scientific management,” it is not just the factory that is being mechanized; instead, “it is now man himself who has become utterly mechanised [gemechaniseerd].” Anticipating the later critique of such analysts as the Marxist writer Harry Braverman (1974), Huizinga (1972) wrote that “the Taylor system … usurps technical competence for management and increases the number of the unskilled and semiskilled workers” (pp. 94–96). For someone who regarded play as “irrational” and yet “one of the main bases of civilisation” (Huizinga, 1955 [1944]: 4–5), this rationalization of human labor could only be regarded with deep foreboding.

Huizinga extended his critique of rationalization to the sphere of American leisure, and particularly to the rising genre of motion pictures. While first characterizing the cinema as a democratic art-form, he quickly shifts to a more critical perspective: “When we accept the art of the cinema as the daily spiritual bread of our time, we acknowledge the enslavement by the machine into which we have fallen” (Huizinga, 1972: 113). The growing prevalence of radio broadcasting was exacerbating these effects, he found during his trip to the United States later in the 1920s: “Radio shares with the moving picture the quality of compelling us to exercise our attention strongly but superficially, completely excluding reflection …” (Huizinga, 1972: 235). Sport, too, was being rationalized by the forces of modern social organization, reducing what should be free play “to normality and uniformity in the service of the mechanical domination of rules [in dienst van het mechanisme der spelregels] and the competitive system” (Huizinga, 1972: 116 – translation modified). In a distinct echo of Weber, Huizinga writes that “the loss of true free personality” is the price that is being paid for the rationalization of sport.

Huizinga concludes this discussion with a critique of the American penchant for eugenics, viewing it as yet another dubious facet of the rationalization of modern culture. “If the regulation of marriages by government on the basis of the studies of heredity should become general practice, then the mechanisation of human society would be as complete as if the homunculus had been discovered” (Huizinga, 1972: 117). Although we have since learned that eugenics was hardly a uniquely American preoccupation, new genetic techniques have moved the question of control over human reproduction to one of the most urgent issues on the social and political agenda in the United States and elsewhere (see, for example, Habermas, 2003).

While the worlds of work and play were being rationalized, however, the world of politics in the United States retained a significant play element, in Huizinga’s view. Anyone who has witnessed an American presidential nominating convention – and especially anyone who has had an opportunity to compare this with, say, the sobriety of a German party congress – can attest to the carnivalesque atmosphere that prevails. Wealthy, well-connected people from the American elite, and on either side of the political party divide, can be found wearing whacky hats and outfits, pumping up and down signs with their favorites’ names emblazoned on them, and blowing loud horns as if they were at a Fourth of July parade. And indeed, the parallel between the two events is quite strong. Yet the emotional element in American politics did nothing to eliminate the dominance of business interests in political life, which transcended the major parties. Indeed, notwithstanding the ways he described how the upper classes were taking the workers to the cleaners, Huizinga endorses Tocqueville’s view that Americans have little interest in the socialistic doctrines that appealed to Europeans: “The dogma of the class struggle has very great weight in the public opinion of Europe, even among non-Socialists, but not in America. Basically American public opinion is uniformly capitalist and patriotic” (Huizinga, 1972: 159).

Despite a more up-to-date and clear-eyed understanding of the forces at work in American capitalism, Huizinga ultimately joins the chorus of voices running from Tocqueville through Sombart who believed that there was and would be no socialism in America. His critical view of the rationalization of American life, however, bears stronger similarities to Weber’s analyses of modernity. Ultimately, Huizinga’s interpretation of American culture seems perhaps most akin to that of the “culture industry” and of “the self-destruction of the Enlightenment” later advanced by the Weberian Marxists Horkheimer and Adorno (1972 [1944]: xiii). ² In his magnum opus Religion in Human Evolution, Robert Bellah (2011) has recently praised Huizinga for his powerful emphasis on the “play element” in social life. Yet otherwise, Huizinga has had relatively little impact on the social sciences, as opposed to the discipline of history, where his Autumn of the Middle Ages has been regarded as an enduring classic. In view of the economic catastrophe wreaked in recent years by manipulators of financial instruments, and the fact that the wealthy continue to take the lion’s share of the benefits generated by the recovery, however, it is hard not to regard Huizinga as one of the more perspicacious observers of American life.