What makes Huizinga a ‘classic’ writer is the harmony of his work. It is as if the unmistakeable unity of this oeuvre projects itself back into his life. Of course Huizinga went through a certain development. Politically he changed from a species of socialist into a species of liberal, the aesthetic cast of his work appears gradually to have been superseded by the ethical, his quest for a religious habitat was eventually stilled by what he called ‘taking delight in the world’. Yet there is essentially no development in Huizinga's life – at least not in a linear sense. It is far better to speak in terms of ‘pupations’, an analogy drawn by Jacob Burckhardt, the cultural historian for whom Huizinga had such great admiration. ‘History is and remains, for me, poetry, in the highest sense of the word,’ Burckhardt wrote to a friend while at university. ‘I see it as a miraculous process of successive pupations and new, perpetually new revelations of mind. I stay here on this edge of the world and stretch out my arms to the source of all things, and that's why to me history is pure poetry, which one may appropriate simply by looking.’

This quotation holds the key to the profound unity of Huizinga's oeuvre. A close look shows how naturally the philologist emerged from the linguist, the historian from the philologist, the cultural critic from the historian. An attentive eye will see that the critic was latent in the linguist, and that the historian always remained a philologist. In essence, the core of both The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens can be found in his early work on Ancient Indian literature. The Waning of the Middle Ages and Man and the Masses in America are pendants; The Waning of the Middle Ages and Dutch Civilization in the Seventeenth Century are mirror images. Homo Ludens is just as much a kind of cultural criticism as In the Shadow of Tomorrow. This cohesiveness in his work is best illustrated by examining its two primary themes: the contrast between old and new, and the concept of rebirth, or renaissance.