A PRAGMATIC INTELLECTUAL

Abstract

Around 1900, the notion of community art (gemeenschapskunst) served to crystallize Dutch social democratic thinking about the role of the arts in society. Drawing on the pragmatism of leading social democrats like Wibaut, and drawing on his formal education in economics and statistics, the self‐made social democrat Emanuel Boekman redressed the utopian meaning of community art to signify the dissemination of “good” culture over all layers of society in his influential 1939 dissertation on the relation of the state to the arts. Being about facts rather than opinions, Boekman set the boundaries of his work to exclude a substantial discussion of the meaning of “good” culture. On the one hand, this pragmatism helped Boekman to gain support for government intervention for the arts over most of the political spectrum. On the other hand, Boekman thus pre‐empted discussions about the tension between “quality” and “accessibility” of the arts that haunts cultural policy in the Netherlands to this day.

KEYWORDS:

• Emanuel Boekman
• community art
• cultural policy
• social democrats
• statistics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Oliver Bennett, Jeremy Ahearne, and Ruth Leary for organizing an intense seminar on intellectuals and cultural policy. I thank all participants, and Oliver Bennett in particular, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. The usual caveat applies.

Notes

1. Van der Ploeg turned out to be quite persistent in his references to Boekman, as witnessed from a presentation on cultural education of 22 March 2000 (Van der Ploeg 2000). Since presentations of members of the government are normally written by civil servants, one can safely infer that Boekman’s ideas on cultural policy were still prominent within the administrative domain, even in 2000.

2. There is a wealth of literature on Morris and the Fabians. Apart from his own writings, E. P. Thompson’s biography (Thompson 1988) is a must. See Kinna (2000) and Upchurch (2002) for recent accounts relevant to this paper and for further references. On the Fabians, see McBriar (1962) and Cole (1961), as well as Fabian Essays itself (Shaw 1962).

3. The party leader of the SDAP, Willem Troelstra, notoriously proclaimed revolution in the Netherlands in 1918 after the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution. This episode served as catalyst for a definitive break between social democrats and communists in the Netherlands as it also enforced a break within the SDAP itself; some important members of the SDAP, such as Henriette Roland Holst‐van Schaik and Herman Gorter, two of the most distinguished Dutch poets, definitively came to side with the communist party.

4. “Eens zal de dag, opgaand, vinden Arbeid en Schoonheid vereend.”

5. And highly successfully so. The city extension “Plan Zuid” has become one of the neighbourhoods most in demand in Amsterdam, and still shows signs of very strongly felt community, though its inhabitants now primarily are part of the wealthy middle and upper class compared to its first inhabitants who belonged to a large extent to the working class.

6. Jan Rogier was director of the Boekmanstichting from 1978 to 1986 when he unexpectedly died.

7. The central text on Dutch pillarization is Lijphart (1968). For a recent assessment of the usefulness of this term, see Blom (2000).

8. In later life, Van Gelderen became professor of political economy. One of his first studies, published in the socialist and radically inclined periodical De Nieuwe Tijd (the new era) in 1913, was on business cycles. The article attracted international scholarly attention and still is considered a classic contribution to the study of business cycles (Freeman 1996).

9. This conception of statistics was also embraced by the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), and by one of the prominent Dutch professors of political economy and statistics in the early decades of the twentieth century, C. A. Verrijn Stuart, who wrote the first Dutch handbook in statistics (Verrijn Stuart 1910) – a book Boekman certainly would have known.

10. The social democrats (and trade unions) had a betwixt attitude towards the unemployed. An unemployed person could not become a member of the SDAP, for example. In fact, the unemployed were treated like untouchables. This attitude only gradually changed in the interwar period.

11. “What was not pinned or nailed down has been squandered up to small exceptions from the innumerable Dutch private collections to foreign countries.”

12. “Kunst is geen regeeringszaak.”

13. For a brief overview of Thorbecke’s views on the relation of state and the arts, see Kempers (1994). A biography of Thorbecke, commissioned by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) to Remieg Aerts, is scheduled to appear in 2008.