ABSTRACT
This paper examines the work of a self-made social democrat, Emanuel Boekman, whose dissertation “Government and the Arts in the Netherlands” (1939) still serves as a benchmark for defining the goals and limits of cultural policy in the Netherlands. I will discuss Boekman’s ideas against the background of wider debates between social democrats and others (Catholics, in particular) on the relation of culture and society. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the aesthetic-, Fabian-and Morris-inspired socialist ideal became the dominant view of the Amsterdam cultural elite. This ideal centred around one central notion – gemeenschapskunst (community art) – that was fleshed out in debates in the journal De Kroniek (The Chronicle) in the early 1890s.
