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This essay gives an outline of a shared “intellectual constitution”, the spiritual bioi parallelloi that united two Dutch scholars, André Jolles and Johan Huizinga, in their endeavour of cultural analysis and cultural criticism. First, it presents the background of their effort, the world of learning they shared with philologists such as Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach. It explains, in particular, the idea of cultural harmony and of methodological notions like that of the possibility to extrapolate from small facts to large issues, and of cultural criticism as a counteroffensive against the loss of harmony. Next, the essay focuses on the common creativity of Jolles and Huizinga and their views on metamorphosis as the inner mechanism of cultural change. For both of them, the notion of form was a trait d’union between mutable life and immutable human nature. Forms, that existed in a limited number, in typological series of social identities or cultural genres, were their main tool in cultural analysis and criticism. Cet essai se veut l’esquisse d’une « constitution intellectuelle » partagée, de bioi paralelloi spirituels, qui ont uni deux savants néerlandais, André Jolles et Johan Huizinga, dans leurs efforts d’analyse et de critique culturelle. D’abord, il présente le contexte de cette aspiration, c’est-à-dire le monde de savoir que ces deux hommes ont partagé avec des philologues comme Ernst Robert Curtius, Leo Spitzer et Erich Auerbach. Ainsi sont expliquées l’idée d’harmonie culturelle et des notions méthodologiques comme le lien tissé entre les petits faits et les grandes questions, et est présentée l’idée de la critique culturelle en tant que contre-offensive contre la perte d’harmonie. Ensuite, l’essai fait le point sur la créativité commune de Jolles et Huizinga, et de leurs interprétations de la métamorphose comme un mécanisme interne de changement culturel. Pour ces deux hommes, la notion de forme a constitué le trait d’union entre la vie muable et la nature humaine immuable. Ces formes, qui se produisent en nombre limité et en séries typologiques d’identités sociales ou de genres culturels, étaient leur principal outil d’analyse et de critique culturelle.

Leiden University was founded in 1575, not only in the midst of great political turmoil, but also in a time that experimented intensely with new forms of higher education. In due course Leiden was to choose an eclectic attitude, remaining loyal on the one hand to late medieval, scholastic traditions, but on the other hand emancipating the arts faculty in agreement with humanist ideas. The thesis this article wants to examine is that the curriculum of Leiden University during the first 75 years of its existence was characterised by a high level of pre-university, Latin schooling, and, linked up with this, a differentiation and specialisation of the arts faculty. These developments, however, had social rather than scientific goals. The arts courses did not prepare the way for a well-defined profession, but served as an initiation into a cultural élite.

Johan Huizinga, the Dutch founding father of cultural history, ranks among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Perhaps best known is Huizinga's revolutionary insight into the formative role of play in human culture, a theory he espoused in the celebrated Homo Ludens, which was published in 1938. For Huizinga, philology was the mother of all interpretive endeavors, reading and writing were part of a collective ritual that channeled human passion into beautiful forms, and passion remained the fundamental fact of human life. In this clear, engaging study, the renowned Dutch scholar Willem Otterspeer paints an original portrait of Huizinga in the context of interwar Europe – and shares his subject's own hallmark passion for history.

Leiden University was conceived as the embodiment of specifically academic ethics which sought to improve society through a cumulative process of knowledge acquisition. Drawing on the idea of Leiden as a 'bastion of liberty', the renowned historian Willem Otterspeer proposes that concepts such as 'equilibrium' and 'mediation' are key to understanding the university as an institution. Modernity and scale expansion have made Leiden University a different institution in the twentyfirst century, one scarcely comparable to what had gone before. As this lively and erudite study shows, a university is a form of social capital, one of Western society's answers to the dilemma of collective action, an instrument for preserving and restoring equilibrium, and hence for fostering continuity. From this vantage point, a university is a confidence-building mechanism that generates solutions to the serious problems facing society today. Also available in Dutch: "http://www.aup.nl/do.php?a=show_visitor_book&isbn=9789087280246">ISBN 978 90 8728 024 6