History and Play: Johan Huizinga and His Critics

Abstract

Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), pre-eminent Dutch historian of twentieth century, published his major theoretical work, Homo Ludens: A Study of Play Element in Culture, in 1938. Since then, this controversial pioneering work of cultural history has become a landmark in growing literature on concept of play, its role in human affairs, and its relevance to study of history. Huizinga was not first thinker to view man and society sub specie ludi. He had a long rich philosophical tradition to draw upon, dating back to antiquity. At very dawn of Western thought, Heraclitus speculated that the course of world is a playing child moving figures on a board child as absolute ruler of universe (Diels, Fragment 52). Huizinga was especially partial to Plato's view of play. What I assert is this; that a man ought to be in serious earnest about serious things, and not about trifles; and that object really worthy of all serious and blessed effort is God, while man is created, as we said above, to be a plaything of God, and best part of him is surely just that; and thus I say that every man and woman ought to pass through life in accordance with this character, playing at noblest of pastimes, being otherwise minded than they now are (Laws, VII, 803). Another important source of Huizinga's theory of play is famous passage in fifteenth letter of Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Man: Man plays only when he is in full sense of word man, and he is only wholly man when he plays. Similar views were expressed by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other modern philosophers.' Although Huizinga was not first to discover value of play in explaining human behavior, he was first to attempt an exact definition of play and of ways in which it infuses and manifests itself in culture, in all spheres of culture: arts, intellectual life, politics, and even legal institutions and warfare. From very beginning of his long and fruitful career, Huizinga had always been concerned with theoretical questions of what culture is, how and why specific cultures come into being and pass