Herman Dooyeweerd was born in Amsterdam on 7 October 1894. His family strongly sympathized with the ideas of the Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian, statesman, and prolific author Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). As a commentator rightly notes, ‘Kuyper’s influence permeated Dooyeweerd’s life in every way’. Dooyeweerd attended the Reformed gymnasium in Amsterdam. In 1912, he enrolled at the Free University (Vrije Universiteit) in Amsterdam at the Faculty of Law. Legal study was more or less a pragmatic choice for Dooyeweerd, who was very interested in literature and wrote poetry. The Free University, founded in 1880 by Kuyper and others, was still very small in those years, with only a few professors of law. In 1917, Dooyeweerd completed a dissertation on the role of the cabinet in Dutch Constitutional law. Afterwards he worked as a civil servant for a few years. In 1922 Dooyeweerd was appointed first deputy director of the Dr Abraham Kuyper Stichting, the newly founded think tank of the Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), the first political party in the Netherlands. Until 1926, he worked at the party’s Kuyper Institute, located in the former residence of Abraham Kuyper in The Hague.