Born in Groningen as the son of Dirk Huizinga, a professor of physiology, and Jacoba Tonkens, who died two years after his birth,[1] he started out as a student of Indo-European languages, earning his degree in 1895.

He continued teaching as an Orientalist until he became a Professor of General and Dutch History at Groningen University in 1905.

He subsequently lived at the house of his colleague Rudolph Cleveringa in De Steeg in Gelderland, near Arnhem, where he died just a few weeks before Nazi rule ended.

[4] Huizinga had an aesthetic approach to history, where art and spectacle played an important part.

Alarmed by the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Huizinga wrote several works of cultural criticism.

Huizinga argued that the spirit of technical and mechanical organisation had replaced spontaneous and organic order in cultural as well as political life.