The Seriousness of Play: Johan Huizinga and Carl Schmitt on Play and the Political

This article addresses the political dimensions of Johan Huizinga’s seminal work Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture (1938). More than just a foundational text in academic ludology, this text positioned itself as a polemic against the right-wing political discourse going on in contemporaneous Nazi Germany, represented chiefly by Carl Schmitt. Through his concept of play, Huizinga hoped to resolve what he perceived to be the confusion of play and seriousness among a group of reactionary theorists narrowly focused on the Schmittian Ernstfall, the “serious case” of inimical violence. This article analyzes the usage of the concepts of “play” and “seriousness” in Huizinga’s and Schmitt’s respective corpuses and, finally, places their work in dialogue in order to understand the difficulties involved in defining play as unserious and unpolitical.