// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did "In the Shadow of Tomorrow" say to today? You're always behind.
| Author | Johan Huizinga |
|---|---|
| Original title | In de schaduwen van morgen |
| Translator | Jakob Herman Huizinga |
| Language | Dutch |
| Publisher | H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon |
| Publication date | October 1935 |
| Publication place | Netherlands |
Published in English | 1936 |
| Pages | 230 |
In the Shadow of Tomorrow: A Diagnosis of the Spiritual Ills of Our Time (Dutch: In de schaduwen van morgen. Een diagnose van het geestelijk lijden van onzen tijd) is a 1935 book by the Dutch writer Johan Huizinga. It is a critical essay about Western culture under modernity, covering issues of war, weakening social structures, decline in cultural expressions, lack of spirit and general worldweariness.[1]
The book was published by H.D. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon in Haarlem in October 1935.[1] It appeared in English in 1936, translated by the author's son Jakob Herman Huizinga.[2]
In the Shadow of Tomorrow was widely discussed for a period and temporarily became more popular than Huizinga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919).[2] It was his best selling work but also his most criticised.[3] The historians Jan Romein, Pieter Geyl and Henk Wesseling have criticised it for analyzing ongoing crises as results of deeper cultural issues rather than economics and politics.[2]
The scholar Henk van den Belt groups In the Shadow of Tomorrow with José Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses (1929) and other interwar-era books of cultural criticism that "expressed deep concerns about the prospects of the humanistic ideals held by a cultural elite to which their authors themselves invariably belonged".[2] Looking at it in retrospect, Belt wrote that the genre "largely became obsolete" in the 1960s "as the fears it expressed turned true".[2] Nora Gosselink similarly groups In the Shadow of Tomorrow with contemporaneous works of cultural pessimism, notably Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1922), whose outlook Huizinga initially had rejected but gradually came to adopt.[3]
References
[edit source]- 1 2 Quaglioni, Diego (2019). "The Weakening of Judgement: Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) and the Crisis of the Western Legal Tradition" (PDF). In Tuori, Kaius; Björklund, Heta (eds.). Roman Law and the Idea of Europe. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 181. ISBN 978-1-3500-5873-6. Retrieved 29 July 2026.
- 1 2 3 4 5 Belt, Henk van den (2022). "A "mighty stream" of anti-intellectualism: Johan Huizinga, his age, and ours" (PDF). Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies. 42 (1): 27–52. Retrieved 29 July 2026.
- 1 2 Gosselink, Nora (2022). "Becoming a Cultural Pessimist: Johan Huizinga's In the Shadow of Tomorrow and The Decline of the West". The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence. 6 (2): 53–61. doi:10.22618/TP.PJCV.20226.2.144.004.