The problem of Kuyper's legacy: the crisis of the anti-revolutionary party in post-war Holland.

Kennedy, James C.

In January of 1947, the anti-revolutionary party (ARP) in the village of Ermelo sponsored a debate on the relationship between socialism and the Kuyperian political tradition of the anti-revolutionaries. Making the case for deep affinities between the two political traditions was the elderly Philipp Kohnstamm, philosopher, adherent of a personalist socialism and--some twenty years before his conversion to Christianity--a heartfelt sympathizer of the party during the 1890s. Kohnstamm reminded his audience that the ARP had been, in the years following the Christian Social Congress of 1891, "a powerfully progressive, outspokenly anti-capitalist party ... willing to sacrifice the notion of antithesis for what she saw as the call of social justice." Indeed, Kuyper himself had said at the Congress that justice lay along the path of socialism. Sadly, however, Kuyper, corrupted by power and old age, abandoned the call of social justice after he became prime minister in 1901, and so did his party, becoming mired in a conservatism from which it still had not emerged. Indeed, its conservatism had become all the more inexcusable, now that the global age of socialism incontrovertibly had dawned. For all of its hidebound conservatism, however, Kohnstamm did not despair of the ARP's future. He urged young anti-revolutionaries "to study carefully and passionately ... the work of your great predecessor," and they would realize that the essential Kuyper had seen the necessity of building a society other than a capitalistic one. (1)

Rebutting Kohnstamm's view, anti-revolutionary parliamentarian Cornelis Smeenk protested that Kuyper had never been a Socialist or socialistic in Kohnstamm's sense. "Socialism" in the 1891 speech was merely used as the polar opposite of "individualism," and what Kuyper actually articulated was an organic view of society, with State and society--and here Smeenk appealed to the Stone Lecture on "Calvinism and Politics"--sharply separated. Kuyper's rejection of socialism, however, did not mean that the anti-revolutionaries, now or then, had simply been capitalist stooges. They always had possessed their own particular vision of social issues, which was neither laissez-faire economics nor State socialism. After all, orthodox Protestants had their own trade union and had supported much social legislation. True to their own vision, and true to Kuyper, the anti-revolutionaries of 1947 rightly rejected Kohnstamm's own Labor party, which now was urging Christians of all stripes to join its ranks, just as they had resisted the party's Marxist pre-war predecessor. And just like their anti-revolutionary ancestors, they continued to resist the rise of "State absolutism" then being promoted in Holland by the Socialist-Catholic coalition's construction of the welfare State. Smeenk also closed by urging the party's youth to study Kuyper diligently, and Groen van Prinsterer, too, in finding strength to carry out their political task. (2)

Figuring out just how the Kuyper of the Christian Social Congress (1891) functionally fit with the Kuyper of "sphere sovereignty" and "antithesis" was hardly a new challenge to anti-revolutionaries in 1947. But since the 1890s, the great bulk of anti-revolutionaries preferred an interpretation of Kuyper far closer to their ARP comrade Smeenk than to the maverick Kohnstamm. More specifically, most anti-revolutionaries had interpreted both sphere sovereignty and Christian social thought through the lens of Kuyper's "apocalyptic fear of the State," as the theologian Albert Van Ruler put it in the 1960s. (3) After 1947, however, the "Smeenk interpretation" of Kuyper became increasingly problematic, as time-tested anti-revolutionary principles seemed to resonate ever less among both traditional ARP voters and Dutch society. This prompted some key anti-revolutionaries to belatedly "rediscover" a Kuyper more like Kohnstamm's version. It is not that they rediscovered a "Socialist" Kuyper in any doctrinaire sense--"socialism" remained problematic--but they did find a Kuyper much less-inhibited about the role of the State as a champion of social justice. In other words, as the trusted Kuyperian bromides like "sphere sovereignty," "antithesis," and hostility to "State absolutism" appeared increasingly unviable in the course of the 1950s, top party leaders suddenly found inspiration from the "young" Kuyper of the Social Congress. (Just as Marxists rediscovered the "young" Marx in the 1960s, so anti-revolutionaries rediscovered the "young" Kuyper in the same decade, even if he was fifty-four years old at the time of the Christian Social Congress.) (4)

What caused this rather startling about-face? Peter Heslam has suggested in his paper that Kuyper's vision for State and society has not so much been found wanting as not been tried. Perhaps this is true if one holds to a more principled standard of what Kuyper intended, or what we might intend. But seen historically, Kuyperianism, as traditionally conceived and practiced, was found wanting by some key anti-revolutionaries in the years after World War II. In my paper, I outline two aspects of this dissatisfaction: (1) an increasing sense in the orthodox Protestant world that Kuyper's legacy was, at least to some degree, burdensome and unhealthy; and (2) the failure of traditional Kuyperianism to resonate politically in post-war Holland. Then I shall describe an attempt, brief and unsuccessful as it was, to breathe new life into Kuyper and his legacy; and then will conclude with brief, evaluative comments.

The Burdens of the Kuyperian Legacy

"We have been able to learn from Kuyper's ideas," the budding Reformed theologian Hendrikus Berkhof wrote in 1937, "but from his deeds we live still." (5) Kuyper's precise role in the creation of subcultural segmentation--commonly known as verzuiling in Dutch and pillarization in English--is a matter of debate, but it seems incontrovertible that the Dutch orthodox Protestant life in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century was very much shaped by Kuyper's integrated vision. Kuyper remained, in life and in death, the first citizen of the subculture that he had helped to create. His vision, set forth both by him and his successors, determined the boundaries of thinking and behavior within this world. This world, still faithful to the man and vision in 1950, was nonetheless showing signs of stress that would ultimately contribute to its dissolution in the 1960s.

First of all, it is important to note that a large number of orthodox Protestants had always had a serious problem with Kuyper and his legacy. There were the Reformed to the "right" of Kuyper, such as the Kersten group who founded a new, Anti-Kuyperian Reformed party in 1918 (the SGP), or the followers of Schilder, who left Kuyper's church in 1944, who disliked Kuyper's all-too-ready willingness to make common cause with Catholics and other suspect allies under the pretext of "common grace." There were the Christian Historicals, who distrusted Kuyper the demagogue, the organization man, and--perhaps most damning for loyalists of the Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk)--Kuyper the sectarian. There were also plenty of Reformed pietists who found--Kuyper's deep personal faith notwithstanding--his anti-revolutionary movement too "activistic," and hence, spiritually superficial. People from these groups looked not to Kuyper as inspirational leader but to Groen van Prinsterer (1801-1876), Kuyper's spiritual mentor, a man less-sullied by dirty practical politics and partisan strife and whose prophetic style better fit both the theology and politics of the more otherworldly Reformed. It is worth noting that the three small Reformed political parties still in existence today are either anti-Kuyperian in heritage (the SGP and, to a lesser extent, the GPV), or post-Kuyperian (the more evangelically tinted RPF, founded in the mid-1970s). It is perhaps worth adding that Groen--as well as many of Kuyper's political competitors--were each later commemorated, through Dutch postage stamps, but Kuyper was never commemorated.

But the negative response to Kuyper's legacy did not stem alone from the critical voices of the non-Kuyperian Reformed. Perhaps even more relevant is that some leaders of the Kuyperian world wearied of living in the shadow of the great man and in the world he had created. One of the most striking features of George Puchinger's interviews with notable figures during the 1960s, many of them with origins in the orthodox Protestant subculture, is how a number of them had chafed, as the business executive J. Meynen put it, under "Kuyper's undue influence." (6) Reading Puchinger, one wonders how many childhoods must have been ruined by overzealous fathers forcing their sons to read Kuyper (the few daughters whom Puchinger interviews do not mention this aspect of their intellectual formation). The man's feet of clay, particularly his sneaky political acumen and his "Napoloeonic" ambition--not to mention his "integralist" desire "to impose his stamp" upon everything--contributed to this emerging anti-Kuyperian sentiment. (7)

The ubiquitous Kuyper must have imposed a heavy burden upon talented Calvinists trying to find their own way in the orthodox Protestant world of early and mid-century Holland. Kuyper fatigue, either stemming from the realization that the great man was actually wrong about a few things--or the hope that he was--cannot be dismissed as an insignificant factor in the crisis in the anti-revolutionary party after World War II. Certainly it helped contribute to the kind of intellectual rebellion against the neo-Calvinist subculture that became a commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s. Reaction against the intellectual and spiritual straightjacket of the old subculture was not as sweeping and vengeful as it was among Dutch Catholics, and most intellectuals raised in the anti-revolutionary tradition did not go so far as Koos Van Weringh who, in 1967, typed Kuyper as a proto-Fascist similar to Adolf Stocker and Charles Maurras. (8) But it was potent reaction nonetheless, and visible to outsiders. In 1966, the theologian G. C. van Niftrik--hardly a Kuyperian him self--urged neo-Calvinists not to throw out Kuyper altogether. (9) "The Free University spends three quarters of its intellectual energy kicking against its past," Labor Party leader Joop den Uyl, himself a Calvinist-turned-agnostic, commented in the early 1970s. (10) Within the tradition, old lights threw up their hands in despair. R. Gosker, old salt from the Protestant trade union (CNV), lamented in 1969 that the Socialists still honored their own leaders from the past century, but that anti-revolutionaries no longer put much stock in Groen, Colijn, or Kuyper.

Accompanying this, of course, was the rise of the new ecumenism during the 1960s, when the two large Reformed churches (the Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk and Kuyper's Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland) rediscovered each other and made the first steps toward reunion. Just as significant was the thaw in relation with Roman Catholics, who--especially in the Netherlands--showed great enthusiasm for contacts with non-Catholics. In an age of openness and reconciliation, it seemed bad form--if they felt any remaining temptation at all--for orthodox Protestants to privilege old household gods like Kuyper. Stronger still, Kuyper's organization of orthodox Protestants in formations separate from Catholics (not to mention the Hervormden) was something that had become downright distasteful, but other, more structural kinds of fatigue proved just as decisive.

At some point, the orthodox Protestant subculture, like its Dutch Catholic counterpart, had become bloodless, less inspired by Kuyperian ideas than driven by institutional inertia. By mid-century, Kuyperian sphere sovereignty had triumphed with a vengeance. A whole subculture was set in place, with its own schools, clubs, and welfare agencies, increasingly subsidized by state money. A process of verstatelijking--literally, State-ization--had turned private institutions into virtual branches of the State. Attempts to reanimate the complex of orthodox Protestant organizations after the war, especially through the followers of Dooyeweerd, failed. Separated by decades from the source of inspiration, the political and religious ardor of many orthodox Protestants cooled, indeed, if many members of the younger generation had ever known this enthusiasm. Here, too, the Kuyperian legacy became oppressive and alienating, as subcultural management largely replaced a sense of mission and purpose. It was this orthodox Protestant subculture that was destined to implode in the 1960s.

By the early 1960s, then, it was not only that Kuyper's legacy had become burdensome, but that it was largely forgotten in bureaucratic arrangements; and also, it should be added, in the flush of unprecedented prosperity. For those who wanted to see orthodox Protestant life rejuvenated, applied "sphere sovereignty" and the separate Protestant organizations created by the "antithesis," had become a problem, rather than a solution, to Christian calling in the world. (11) Given these increasing problems, where might anti-revolutionary politicians find sources of inspiration for continuing the Kuyperian legacy? There was no easy answer.

Political Kuyperianism at an Impasse

Politically, the anti-revolutionary party of the late 1940s and 1950s was in no better shape. Once at the center of Dutch politics, after World War II they found themselves outside the mainstream of Dutch politics--and out of government--as Catholics and Socialists worked together between 1945 and 1958 to create a welfare State acceptable to both parties. The anti-revolutionaries fulminated against this trend, but they were powerless to stop it. In 1952, on the principle of joining those one cannot beat, and responding to the pressures of the more socially Leftist Protestant trade union (CNV), they entered the government and saw to it that they remained there until the ARP merged into the interconfessional Christian Democratic Appeal in 1980. Although the anti-revolutionaries were back in power, it worked no wonders for their political identity. As anti-revolutionary parliamentarians continued to pillory State socialism in the 1950s, their own government ministers were contributing to its construction. By the late 1950s, the ARP rank-and-file, as old-line antirevolutionary intellectuals such as N. J. Hommes and S. U. Zuidema noted with concern, had come to accept the welfare State as a natural part of the landscape. (12)

To make matters even more difficult for the ARP, the perceived "end of ideology," in which the multitude of technocratic decisions, compounded by widespread consensus on the mixed economy at home and anti-communism abroad, seemed to obviate the need for sharp ideological posturing. This development was pure poison to parties of principle like the ARP, which found it increasingly difficult to profile itself in this context. Anti-revolutionary politics looked more and more like an example of Robert Dahl's "interest group pluralism," bringing home pork for the constituents, however much they continued to fly high the flag of principle. (13) Finally, the new globalism of the post-war periods undermined the consciously "Christian national" politics of traditional anti-revolutionary vintage. These and other factors contributed to the sagging fortunes of the party, which garnered 13.2 percent of the total Dutch vote in 1948 but only 8.7 percent in 1963. The party's slide was slow but increasingly predictable.

By the late 1950s, the word impasse was routinely used by anti-revolutionaries to describe their political predicament. In 1961, W. C. D. Hoogendijk, a deeply traditional anti-revolutionary, who, by the end of the decade, had shifted decisively to the Left wing of the party, admitted that the ARP had "failed to develop a specifically anti-revolutionary vision for the political problems of our time." In a fast-changing world, he said, the anti-revolutionaries had stood still and had lost their persuasiveness. (14) For Hoogendijk and others, doubt now replaced the certainty that had long characterized anti-revolutionary politics.

An Answer: The ARP As "Revolutionary Action Center"

Times of crisis breed conversion, and this was certainly the case for a number of key anti-revolutionaries. In the early to mid-1960s, a number of quite traditional ARP leaders, many, though not all, intellectuals, moved Leftward: Hoogendijk, Wiert Berghuis, the party chairman, Siewert Bruins Slot, ARP parliamentary leader, party secretary Johan Prins, and Willem Aantjes, ARP leader in the mid-1970s (we could ask Bob Goudzwaard, conference speaker, whether he counts himself among this illustrious group). "The more I tried to make my right-wing views a reality, the more Leftist I actually became," said Hoogendijk in 1968. (15) Setting them in motion was the increasing conviction that anti-revolutionary politics had become the party of self-interest for middle-class orthodox Protestants, rather than for the whole country--and the whole world. (16) What these anti-revolutionaries and many younger members of the ARP appeared to discover was that the anti-revolutionary tradition had been, or ought to have been, a progressive party, deeply suspicious of capitalism, hostile to economic privilege, and willing to sacrifice the notion of antithesis for human solidarity and social justice. The ARP had always been the party of the "social Left," Chairman Berghuis maintained in the 1960s, (17) and "radical" ARP members like himself appealed to a tradition that included Groen, Gerbrandy, Talma (the anti-revolutionary minister with the best track record on social legislation) and, of course, the "young" Kuyper of the Christian Social Congress, however much they thought that Kuyper's hierarchical understanding of society needed to be revised. (18)

In particular, "peace and justice" were the issues that gave anti-revolutionary politics a new Elan in the 1960s: elimination of remaining poverty in the Netherlands, a passionate commitment to development aid, and an increasing concern about the morality of the Vietnam War and mutually assured destruction. Anti-communism yielded to a new globalism, and resistance to undue State influence was replaced by an enthusiasm for big-ticket social-welfare expenditures, to the amazement of some ARP politicians like ex-party secretary Jan de Koning. (19) Prins wanted a "radical" party that exposed the root of all disharmony in society and ushered in a new society. Hoogendijk thought that "anti-revolutionary" meant anders revolutionair, revolutionary in a different way. A number of radical anti-revolutionaries wanted the party to become, as they put it, a "revolutionary action center." (20)

Metamorphizing the ARP into a party of the "social Left" found a good deal of support among certain top circles in the party and the youth wing of the party. Nor did it do great damage at the polls; the ARP remained stable electorally in the 1960s and early 1970s while its Catholic political ally, the KVP, lost nearly half of its representation in parliament between 1967 and 1972. The new social "solidarity" of the party continued to be a source of ideological Elan within the ARP culminating, perhaps, in Aantjes' "Sermon on the Mount" speech in the mid-1970s, which was an impassioned Christian plea for social justice. Aantjes' speech, and the presence of a number of ARP progressives in the Left-wing Den Uyl cabinet (1973-1977) continued to give the anti-revolutionaries something of a "progressive" image and continued to give hope to new-style anti-revolutionaries that they might fully transform the party in accordance with their vision.

It was not to be. Traditional anti-revolutionaries remained hostile to their aspirations, regarding the new politics as a perversion of true antirevolutionary principles. More important, it was the anti-revolutionary centrists, who preferred a more moderate--and more vague--Christian Democratic party of Catholics and Protestants, who clearly emerged as the most dominant force in the party. The centrists also included a number of antirevolutionary radicals of the 1960s, who softened their own stance over the years, either out of pragmatism or a new sobriety about the attainability of their goals. To be sure, the new Kuyperianism continued to make itself felt in the interconfessional Christian Democratic Appeal, but the pragmatic centrism of the CDA left little room for the kind of principled politics traditionally practiced by the ARP and little room for anything more than an occasional nod to "Abraham the Great" and his ideas.

Conclusion

The "social" Kuyper was enthusiastically rediscovered at precisely the point when the ARP's fortunes were in decline, along with the orthodox Protestant subculture that had sustained the party at the point of dissolution. In this context, a Kuyper akin to Kohnstamm's interpretation of him became for a number of anti-revolutionaries the best way in the 1960s to revitalize the still-honored anti-revolutionary tradition. For some, the new politics also became a liberating way to escape Kuyper's oppressive and confining legacy imposed by the institutionalization of his ideas. Within only a short span of years, it became clear, however, that the energetic burst of revisionist Kuyperianism did not save the anti-revolutionary tradition in the Netherlands. Sixties idealism quickly dissipated, the pragmatic centrists took over, and the deconfessionalization of Dutch Christian democracy continued at a rapid pace.

How, then, can one evaluate the post-war turn to the Left? In an important sense, the anti-revolutionary "social Left" of the 1960s was the glorious sunset of the party's history, the reanimation of a century of Kuyperian politics and a brave new effort to meet the demands of the age. Articulated by anti-revolutionaries genuinely committed to their political tradition, the ARP as party of "social Left" restored to the party a prophetic power and Elan that it had missed for years. And if the "social Left" failed to win the day, it was in no small part because their anti-revolutionary peers of less adventuresome stripe had failed to take up the call of "evangelical radicality."

At the same time, however, the militantly "radical" Kuyperianism had the effect of standing traditional Kuyperianism on its head, so deemphasizing traditional understandings of sphere sovereignty, antithesis, and suspicion of the State as to make the party unrecognizable to many old hands. Indeed, the self-conscious "radicalism" and "progressiveness" of the new kind of anti-revolutionaries tended to obscure the lines of continuity that many--not all--of them continued to feel with the past. Moreover, their relative lack of interest in doctrinal orthodoxy and a strong sense of Christian community vis-a-vis the world tended to undermine the very base in which Christian social teaching could flourish. The Kuyper of the Christian Social Congress may often, all too often, have been subordinated to other anti-revolutionary concerns before 1960, but without the robust presence of the "older" Kuyper, the "young" Kuyper stood no chance at all in the secularizing climate of 1960s Holland.

It was, perhaps, above all the collapse of a resilient, politically engaged orthodox Protestantism that ultimately undermined the existence of the ARP and a potentially productive role for the "social Left" in the party. The vital role of the Church and of theology, however, in the transformation of Protestant--and Catholic--Holland after 1945 is a story that will have to be told elsewhere, at another time. (21)

James C. Kennedy

Hope College

Notes

(1.) Ph. Kohnstamm, De A.R. Partij en het socialisme (Amsterdam: W. ten Have, 1947). The brochure is the worked-out version of the January 1947 debate and should not be regarded as a verbatim account of it.

(2.) C. Smeenk, In Kuyper's lijn. De Anti-revolutionaire partij en het socialisme (Arnhem: s.n., 1947).

(3.) A. A. van Ruler interviewed in G. Puchinger, Hervormd of gereformeerd. EEn of gescheiden? (Delft: Meinema, 1969), 361-62.

(4.) It is difficult to determine where the somewhat misleading distinction of the "young" and "old" Kuyper was first expressed; for an early example, see A. van Biemen, "Het geestelijke-eigene van het religieus socialisme," in Samen op weg. Vijftig jaar ontmoeting tussen Christendom en Socialisme in De Blijde Wereld en Tijd en Taak, ed. H. J. Wilzen and Van Biemen (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1953). The problem with the distinction is not only that Kuyper was middle-aged in 1891, but that his interest in "the social question" persisted, most notably in 1918, toward the end of his life.

(5.) Berkhof citing himself from Libertas ex Veritate, VIII, (1937), 355, in George Puchinger's 1967 interview with him; see Puchinger, Christen en secularisatie (Delft: Meinema, 1968), 36-37.

(6.) J. Meynen interviewed in G. Puchinger, Is de gereformeerde wereld veranderd? (Delft: Meinema, 1966), 139-41. See similar comments, less directed at Kuyper and more at the world he created, in Puchinger's interview with W. F. de Gaay Fortman, 40-41.

(7.) See C. Boekestijn in Puchinger, Christen en secularisatie (Delft: Meinema, 1968), 340; J. J. Buskes in Hervormd of gereformeerd, 302-4; Thijs Booy and J. H. Prins in Is de gereformeerde wereld veranderd?, 173-74; 424-25; and E. van Raalte in Hergroepering der partijen? (Delft: Meinema, 1968), 660-61. Obviously, the many, meaty interviews conducted by Puchinger (1921-1999) during the 1960s are valuable for gaining insight into the orthodox Protestant world just before, and during, its ferment and decline.

(8.) Jacobus van Weringh, Het maatschappijbeeld van Abraham Kuyper (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1967).

(9.) R. Gosker, "Verontrusten en spijtstemmers," Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde 39 (1969): 70; G. C. van Niftrik in Is de gereformeerde wereld veranderd?, 372.

(10.) Den Uyl cited in Martin van Amerongen and Igor Cornelissen, Tegen de revolutie: Het evangelie! Het kerkvolk in de Nederlandse politiek of: Het einde van een christelijke natie (Amsterdam/Brussels: Paris-Manteau, 1972), 149.

(11.) See R. van Dijk, "Sovereiniteit in eigen kring in onze moderne samenleving," Trouw, 20 June 1959.

(12.) N. J. Hommes, Zullen wij nog Anti-revolutionair blijven?, 2nd printing (Kampen: Kok, 1957); S. U. Zuidema, "Anti-revolutionaire politiek in de welvaartstaat en de welvaartstaat in de Anti-revolutionaire politiek," Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde 34 (1964): 188-96.

(13.) Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in the American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961).

(14.) W. C. D. Hoogendijk, Jr., "Realia der christelijke politiek," Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde 31 (1961): 129-40.

(15.) Hoogendijk cited in H. E. S. Woldring and D. Th. Kuiper, Reformatorische maatschappijkritiek (Kampen: Kok, 1980), 280. (This book remains the standard and indispensable introduction into Reformed social thought in the Netherlands since the late nineteenth century.) To describe the move as "Leftward" is not without problems, since many anti-revolutionaries, especially the more theoretically sophisticated among them, traditionally eschewed the Left-Right binary. Goudzwaard told me after the paper that he avoided thinking in these terms, but it is also clear that Hogendijk, Berghuis and others clearly thought in terms of a move to the Left.

(16.) For an early example of Berghuis' shift, see his 1959 speech, Rechtsstaat en welvaartsstaat (n.d., n.p.).

(17.) Berghuis began to use this terminology after 1960; see the ARP brochure Koers en eenheid (1965).

(18.) For the modification of Kuyper's social vision, H. J. van Zuthem, Gezag en zeggenschap (Kampen: Kok, 1968), 5-30.

(19.) Interview with Jan de Koning, Zaandam, 30 March 1993.

(20.) J. H. Prins, "Vraag en antwoord," Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde 35 (1965): 75-76; W. Albeda, E. de Boer, A. Bos, L. Bosch, J. Hollander and H. J. van Zuthem, "Over christelijke politiek en christelijke partijvorming," Anti-Revolutionaire Staatkunde 37 (1967): 97-105. The latter article, in particular, incensed more traditionally minded anti-revolutionaries, and they objected strenuously and publicly.

(21.) My heartfelt thanks to Dirk Kuiper of the Free University of Amsterdam and Hans-Martien Ten Napel of Leiden University for their time and suggestions while I was preparing this article. For further reading on the ARP in these years, see P. L. van Enk, De aftocht van de ARP: jaren van strijd tussen macht en beginsel (Kampen: Kok, 1986), and Jan-Jaap van den Berg, Deining: koers en karakter van de ARP ter discussie, 1956-1970 (Kampen: Kok, 1999). Van den Berg's book contains an English summary. It appeared too late to be used for this conference paper.