Erik Vermeulen

It would seem to the purpose here to consider the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his relation to his fellow-historians, Robert Fruin and Jan Romein. For in this trio Huizinga contrasted with Fruin, and in his turn Romein contrasted with Huizinga, whereas, on the other hand, in spite of their different view-points, they are at the same time connected by the plainly unbroken line of liberal adogmatism. Fruin the father of Dutch historiography, was original in his liberal adogmatism. Not a single thesis, according to him, is to be carried into safety beforehand and exempted from investigation. Nothing is to be held up for acceptance without permission for examination. In demanding such blind acceptance one would be guilty of moral constraint and mental repression, a fault according to him especially committed by the Roman Catholic Church. In the long run this liberal and adogmatic inspiration of Fruin's came to run dry. With him the devices and the technique of research became ends in themselves. Fruin rationalized this development in the thesis that the disinterestedness with which we ought to strive after the truth would be tarnished if we were to expect from scholarly historical research any contribution whatsoever to the existential unfolding of the investigating subject. Huizinga's views on the theory of history constitute a violent reaction to this view. He argues that owing to the historian's selection of his material, as well as by the ideas through which the historian comprehends the historical process, subjectivity is unavoidable. Moreover, it is desirable. It is unscholariy, Huizinga says, to assume without evidence that the purification the subject desires to undergo by his adogmatic stand, should presuppose complete elimination—impossible in itself—of any subjective element whatsoever. The idea of objectivity, he says, should be broadened from a non-subjective objectivity, without evidence too narrowly conceived, per se unattainable, into an objectivity accessible in and from subjectivity. It is not his aim to destroy the subject; on the contrary, by adapting it to the object he wants to make the subject more pure and truthful. Huizinga's liberal and adogmatic purification of the subject was not integral in so far as he, from a sense of helplessness, deliberately overlooked an important part of historic reality. Man's suffering in history was to be stoically ignored. Being a homo ludens, transcending economic efficiency, freely developing one's affects, creating civilisation, is, in Huizinga's view, not accessible to man as man but only to the upper stratum of society. The homo ludens, according to him, is only possible by virtue of a stratification of society that makes a small number of privileged people transcend things economic because others are producing for them. He thought he saw in contemporary history the homo ludens more and more ousted by the homo economkus, a process which seemed to him to go against the grain of man's deepest being, and for that reason odious to him. It should be seen in this light that Huizinga's historical interest has resulted in a flight from contemporary reality towards periods that are to be sure, irrevocably of the past, but the study of which still enables us to experience that tempering of reality without which life is dim, which still grants sweet forgetfulness to him who seeks it. Reacting to Huizinga, Romein argues that the historian's account to himself should also cover his fellow-man's sufferings. The invitation to transcend things economic should not, Romein says, be seen as extended to man as a member of the upper strata of society but as extended to man as man. Historical interest, he argues, is not a sterile longing for the irrevocable past of a privileged class. Historical interest, he thinks, is investigation and interpretation of the past also with a view to the realization in the present and future of purposeful possibilities. This should not be understood in a subjectivistic way, as if it were only a matter of apologetic urges. Unfortunately, such an interpretation is only too common in the Netherlands. Within the limited national frame Romein is not always spared there that slight tragedy of incomprehension hemming in any man in advance of his time. In fact, Romein is truly concerned with discovering true sense in the historical events, a sense arising from the objective character proper to the historical process itself; not to do it violence but just to adapt oneself to it in one's future-shaping actions. If, Romein says, the liberal and adogmatic discipline of history should not accomplish this task, man's spiritual and social life would lack a mainstay which can safeguard it against a lapse into the practice of subjectivistic irrationalism, feared alike by Fruin, by Huizinga, and by Romein himself