Samuel van Houten

Dutch politician

Samuel van Houten (17 February 1837 – 14 October 1930) was a Dutch liberal politician, who served as Minister of the Interior from 1894 to 1897.

Van Houten was born in Groningen into a wealthy Mennonite family. His parents were Derk van Houten, a timber merchant and local politician, and his wife Barbara Elizabeth Meihuizen. After attending a Latin school from 1849 to 1854, he studied Law at the University of Groningen, obtaining a degree in 1859. He then worked as a lawyer. He quickly became involved in the city's politics, getting elected to the municipal council in 1864 and becoming one of the city's aldermen in 1867. About this time Van Houten left the Mennonite Church and became an agnostic.

In 1869, van Houten was first elected to the House of Representatives for the electoral district Groningen. In the House of Representatives, Van Houten quickly established himself as an independent liberal, not reluctant to criticise the Thorbeckian liberal establishment. He denounced what he saw as a centralist tendency in the ideology of their leader, Johan Rudolph Thorbecke, jokingly referring to the latter's views as Bonapartism in 1872. Van Houten, in contrast, adhered to the belief that the historical development of different sectors of society should be respected, in this sense sharing semblance to Abraham Kuyper's theory of sphere sovereignty. This belief led him to take a different position on the issue of the school struggle than most of his fellow liberals. Also, through his daughter Sina, her two sons, Sir Frederick Leith Ross, who was chief economic advisor to the UK government from 1932 to 1945 and Harry Leith Ross, who was a well known artist who lived and worked in the US.