The American Dream and the National Game

Chapter I. Johan Huizinga’s World of Work and Play

I JOHAN HUIZINGA'S WORLD OF WORK AND PLAY LIKE ANY OTHER CONCEPT, PLAY CAN BE UNDERSTOOD IN MANY WAYS. The concept that serves to unite the diverse subject matters of my essay is set forth in Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Homo Ludens was published near the end of Huizinga's life, in 1938, and before we consider his theory of the nature of play, it seems best to consider some of the contexts in which the theory appears. Huizinga was trained as a philologist and followed the profession of history, but Homo Ludens falls within neither of these academic disciplines . R. W. Colie offers the best description of the kind of book it is. From 1935 on, Huizinga's principal work was not historical, though it was cultural. In that year, only two years after Hitler's coup, he published In the Shadow of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Ills of Our Time, a highly polemical, pessimistic analysis of contemporary mass culture. Ten years later, the book he had been working on during his isolation in De Steeg was posthumously published, The World in Ruins: A Consideration of the Chances for Restoring Our Civilization, a sequel and a corrective to In The Shadow of Tomorrow. 1 9 10 Homo Ludens is only partially an "analysis of contemporary mass culture" and perhaps not even principally that, but we should be aware that it forms part of a body of work in which Huizinga offered a systematic criticism of modern society. Another scholar has described the role Huizinga played during these years as that of "the scholar as warning prophet and guide towards salvation,"2 a description which a brief examination of In the Shadow of Tomorrow will reveal as being just. In the Shadow of Tomorrow was a relatively popular book. Its first edition in 1935 was sold out at once and by 1938, the year Homo Ludens appeared, it had been through seven more and had been translated into nine foreign languages.3 It was also a controversial book. Huizinga was taken to task for what others regarded as his "faulty reading of modern culture" and some argued that he did not actually offer a reading of modern culture at all but simply recorded his revulsion from it.4 Huizinga presented his vision of the present and future as follows. The gods of our time, mechanization and organization, have brought life and death. They have wired up the whole world, established contact throughout, created everywhere the possibility of cooperation, concentration of strength and mutual understanding. At the same time they have trapped the spirit, fettered it, stifled it. They have led man from individualism to collectivism, the negation of the deepest personal values, the slavery of the spirit. will the future be one of ever greater mechanisation of society solely governed by the demands of utility and power?5 The concluding question seems rhetorical: Huizinga's fears are evidently greater than his hopes. The chief manifestation of "the slavery of the spirit" he calls "puerilism." He devotes a whole chapter to it, defining it as "the attitude of a community whose behavior. . . instead of making the boy into the man adapts its conduct to that of the adolescent age.,,6 The country where this phenomenon could be studied "most thoroughly in all of its aspects" was, according to Huizinga, America. Huizinga had visited America and in 1918 had published a book called Man and Mass in America, a book which both Colie and Pieter Geyl think of as a precursor of In the Shadow of Tomorrow. In speaking of the latter book, Colie remarks that it "points out at length the grimmer aspects of mass culture that Huizinga had first sketched in Man and Mass in America, a book partially a continua- 11 tion of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.,,7 Geyl suggests that "what drove him [Huizinga] to that study Man and Mass in America . . was undoubtedly that he was already beginning to watch the development of western civilization with misgivings, and in America he discerned some of its, to his thinking , most ominous tendencies in alarming force."s "The modern puerilism," Huizinga felt, presented itself in two ways. These amounted to a confusion of the roles of work and play in the world. "On the one hand," said Huizinga, "activities of a professedly...