Herman Vuijsje is a Dutch sociologist and writer with a special interest in affairs of social morality, religion and spatial planning. He was born in Amsterdam in 1946, at the height of the baby boom. In 1974 he graduated as a sociologist at Amsterdam University. In the seventies and the eighties he worked as a journalist with various Dutch newspapers and magazines. Nowadays he is a free-lance writer, based in Amsterdam. Vuijsje's books are about such various subjects as Dutch Saint-Nicholas (Sinterklaas) poetry, an 'inverse' pilgrimage from Santiago de Compostela to Amsterdam (Pilgrim without a God, 1991) and the history of the Anne Frank House (2010).

 

 

An important focus in Vuijsjes work is the rapid change the Netherlands went through in the last decades. In his books he shows himself an early critic of the political correctness that suffocated the debate on issues like immigration and integration for a long time. Vuijsje wrote books about the ethnic taboo (Innocence Murdered: Ethnic Difference as a Dutch Taboo, 1986, and Blackface fighters, 2018), the taboo on state coercion (In Praise of Coercion, 1989) and the privacy taboo.

In his book Correct (1997) the ideas of these books were summarized and put in a broader analytical and explanatory context. In 1999, Correct was granted the 'Prix des Ambassadeurs'. In 2000 an English translation was published by Greenwood Press (Westport, Connecticut/London): The Politically Correct Netherlands since the 1960s. A revised edition in Dutch was published in 2008.

 

 

In 2004, Vuijsje took a walking tour through Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and Latvia, in order to write a book on the changes in agriculture and countryside that are brought about by their entry into the European Union. An English translation was published by Inmerc publishers in cooperation with the Dutch Department of Agriculture: The Price of Paradise, a journey on foot through the countryside of the new Europe.