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chapter 1
Introduction
Auguste Comte (1798–1857), a Frenchman, coined the term ‘sociology’, and is therefore generally regarded as having founded the subject which since then has been the home of social theory. Because sports and all other leisure activities are social inventions, sociology is their natural academic home. Nearly all our modern sports, and many other modern leisure activities such as the holiday away from home, were invented in nineteenth-century Europe, in countries that were becoming industrial and urban. Sociology was born in response to, and as attempts to explain, these social transformations. However, it was over one hundred years after Comte’s death in 1857 before sociologists collectively began to study any leisure activities. This neglect of leisure was not peculiar to sociology. None of the social sciences paid significant attention to ‘frivolous’ pastimes before their economic importance was recognised, which was towards the end of the twentieth century. By then the most advanced economies were becoming post-industrial, and leisure goods and services were increasingly important as sources of employment and contributors to countries’ trade balances. Hence the explosion of student numbers and courses with leisure, recreation, sport, media, tourism and events in their titles. All these courses expect an input from sociology, including its theories about the character of the societies in which sport and the rest of leisure are located. The problem is that from Comte onwards hardly any of the major social theorists wrote anything about any kind of leisure. Even so, this book will show that the theories can be made to speak about sport and leisure. They can be used to find answers to questions that sport and other leisure scholars are already addressing, and to pose entirely new questions.
Sociology and its social theories
Auguste Comte founded sociology in the sense of coining the word, which literally means the study of society or societies. Coining the word, and the word itself, became important in creating an identity for a new kind of social thought. Comte’s own theory was soon rejected, but his ideas about the mission of sociology, its overall character and scope, governed its development in Europe until the 1930s. Comte’s sociology was to differ from earlier social thought because sociology’s methods would be scientific. The nineteenth century was an age when the prestige of science was ascendant. Science was responsible for the remarkable progress that was continuing in transportation, manufacturing and the arts of warfare. Comte expected sociology to earn the same status, and to unleash equivalent progress in the management of social change.
Comte’s sociology, in his own terms, was to study social statics and social dynamics, what we now call social structure and social change. It was to establish laws of history that would account for the changes that were under way in France (Comte’s home country) and the rest of Europe in the nineteenth century, and explain how to ease the birth of the emerging economic, political and social orders. Comte was born in the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789–1793). In 1799, during Comte’s infancy, Napoleon Bonaparte, an army commander, took charge of the revolution, was declared Emperor (of the French Empire) in 1804, and then led the country into a series of ultimately unsuccessful military campaigns which were supposed to spread French republicanism and the ideals of the revolution (liberty, equality, fraternity) throughout Europe. The Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, but throughout Comte’s adult life there were continuous rumblings of discontent among the people of France, and in 1830 and 1848 there were failed attempts to repeat the revolution of 1789. The foundations of France and other European societies were shaking. Comte’s sociology was to explain what was happening, to identify what was driving the changes, and to reach conclusions on how the changes should be managed.
Comte was keen to keep sociology separate from what he called ‘social physics’, what would now be called social statistics, gathering data on rates of fertility, marriages and deaths, housing, health and other conditions in industrial factories, mines and cities. Comte’s insistence that sociology should have grander intellectual ambitions was to cripple the subject’s development in Europe for a century. Researching conditions in industrial towns and factories, measuring the incidence and seeking the causes of poverty, crime and other social problems, became a separate endeavour which was linked closely to social and political reform movements. When it became the base of an academic subject, this was called ‘social administration’, a title subsequently dropped in favour of ‘social policy’.
In America sociology developed differently from the 1870s onwards. It studied social change in the nation. This subject became a popular student choice, and from the 1890s spread rapidly throughout universities across the USA. In Europe sociology was an academic weakling until European and American sociology converged and European sociology embraced Comte’s social physics, which was after the Second World War. Until then European sociology comprised theories about the course of history and the general character of the latest modern societies. The subject did not sink any academic roots until Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) became Europe’s first professor of sociology at the University of Bordeaux (France) in 1895. The subject then began to spread to universities in other European countries, but the spread was extremely thin. Sociology was taught at the London School of Economics from 1905, and nowhere else in Britain until the end of the 1930s. The discipline was then reconstituted. American and European sociology converged. In Europe the subject embraced Comte’s social physics, grew in popularity rapidly, and soon became part of the standard university offer. As sociology grew, its scholars began to specialise in the family, education, crime and so on, and it was as part of this process that the study of sport and other kinds of leisure became sub-disciplines among sociology’s numerous specialisms, albeit very minor sub-disciplines until the 1990s. Sociologists at the time of the subject’s great expansion, between the 1940s and 1960s, had to decide which theories from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they wished to retain in the discipline which was to be presented to new cohorts of students. Comte was not among these theorists. The choice of ‘founding fathers’ or ‘classical theorists’, as they became known, comprised Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Max Weber (1860–1920). These, along with the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), who studied and developed a synthesis of European social theories, are the scholars, the classical theorists, who feature in Part I of this book.
Durkheim and Parsons held academic posts as sociologists. Max Weber was an academic, but his job title was economics. Karl Marx, like Comte, did not have an academic career. Auguste Comte was secretary to a French aristocrat who, in effect, was Comte’s patron. At that time Europe’s intellectuals were not necessarily based in universities. They were as likely to be clergymen as academics, or persons with independent means, or they were supported by wealthy patrons. Comte realised that his own career belonged to an era that was drawing to a close. Karl Marx shared this belief. His main patron was Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), who was from a German family with wealth made from the manufacture and trade in textiles. Some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social theorists held academic posts, but not in sociology. In the eighteenth century they would most likely have been called moral or political philosophers, to which the subject political economy was added during the nineteenth century. Theorists who were claimed by sociology during the twentieth century had not necessarily regarded themselves, or been regarded by contemporaries, as practising sociology. Politics, economics, sociology, law and history began to separate as distinct modern disciplines only during the 1890s, and this separation continued gradually until the 1930s. As already explained, some nineteenth-century intellectuals were based in universities, but others had independent means or wealthy patrons, or non-academic occupations. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), whose essay on population commanded widespread attention throughout the nineteenth century, was a clergyman. He argued that human populations tended to increase in geometric progression (doubling then doubling again), whereas food supply rose only in arithmetical progression (by an identical unit in successive time periods). According to Malthus, this meant that population growth had to be held in check by famine, pestilence or war. This future could be avoided only if humans exercised sexual restraint, which Malthus considered unlikely. Malthus’s ideas enjoyed huge credibility throughout the nineteenth century, when Europe’s economies were expanding but poverty persisted. Then, from the late nineteenth century, Europe’s populations began to practise birth control, and Malthus’s theory was forgotten. Malthus was not claimed among the founders of sociology. Apart from having been proved wrong, his intellectual ambitions were too narrow.
All the theories claimed as part of sociology’s history offered explanations of how societies had changed throughout human history. Some claimed that human thought had been the change driver. This was the view of Auguste Comte and his contemporary Georg Hegel (1770–1831), the eminent German philosopher. Comte believed that human thought had developed through three stages (his Law of Three Stages). A theological stage when events were explained as the work of fire spirits, wind spirits and so on had been followed by a metaphysical stage when explanations were in terms of abstract forces such as natural law or the will of God, which was being followed by a scientific stage where explanations were in terms of laws of cause and effect. Comte’s view was that the scientific era had begun in the natural sciences and would conclude with the development of sociology. Comte was enthusiastic about the future. He expected sociology to become the new religion. Science replacing religion was a common expectation among nineteenth-century intellectuals, fuelled by battles between churchmen and scientists, over astronomy during the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, then about evolution in the nineteenth century, and science appeared to be winning all these battles. Leonard Hobhouse (1864–1929), the first professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, believed that moral evolution had been the historical change driver. In the earliest societies people had followed specific moral rules that governed behaviour towards particular categories of persons such as family members. Hobhouse believed that the eventual outcome of evolution would be general ethical principles that applied to all humanity. Hobhouse’s ideas were forgotten during the mid-twentieth-century reconstitution of sociology, but today, with the United Nations having created courts which claim worldwide jurisdiction, it appears that Hobhouse may have read history correctly. However, like Comte’s Law of Three Stages, Hobhouse was dismissed as mistaken. It was Max Weber’s more sophisticated account of the role of ideas in history that was incorporated into the reconstituted post-1945 sociology.
In the nineteenth century theories of evolution were among the big debates and advances in the natural sciences. Eventually it was the theory of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) that triumphed. Evolution was said to be the outcome of struggles for survival between different plants and animals, and the specimens within species that were born with innate advantages were said to be the most likely to survive and eventually to become the dominant type. Many nineteenth-century social theorists argued that societies had evolved in a similar manner. The nineteenth century was the period when scientists were dividing humanity into different races. It was also an age of empire-building. Europeans (most of them) had no doubt that they were innately superior to other races. This is why social anthropology, a subject that spread alongside empires and studied ‘primitive people’ and their simple societies, aligned not with sociology, but with anthropology, which studied the physical differences between different sections of humanity. Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909), who was based in Krakow (now in Poland, but part of Austria at the time), argued that the driver of social evolution had been a struggle for supremacy between different races. Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), a French aristocrat, agreed, and he also identified (or invented) an Aryan race. These contributions have been airbrushed from most histories of sociology, but they, alongside Comte and Hobhouse, would have been part of the curriculum on pre-1939 courses in Europe.
A different explanation of social evolution was offered by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). He was the son of a Derbyshire clergyman and started his working life with a railway company, then became an independent scholar earning his living from books, journalism and lectures. He argued that all species had evolved from simpler to more complex types because complex organisms were always the stronger, the best able to survive. Spencer (not Darwin) was the first to use the expression ‘the survival of the fittest’. He was also the first to liken societies to biological organisms such as animal bodies. Spencer was a polymath, an expert on everything, an intellectual type that has now become extinct. He became an international intellectual celebrity, invited to lecture in the USA, and his advice was sought by the Japanese government when the country was seeking to modernise in the late nineteenth century. Adam Smith (1723–1790), a Scottish moral philosopher, had already drawn attention to the advantages of a division of labour within businesses (enabling workers to specialise in the tasks to which they were best suited), and also to the progressive force of the ‘hidden hand of the market’ and how the pursuit of individual self-interest led to greater all-round prosperity. Spencer argued that a broader division of labour, across all parts of a society, strengthened its chances in the struggle for survival. Unfortunately for Spencer’s legacy, his ideas were incorporated into Emile Durkheim’s more comprehensive account of the progressive division of labour, and it was Durkheim who became recognised as one of sociology’s founding fathers. Durkheim also had the advantage of being a dedicated sociologist rather than a polymath, and he was not only employed as a sociologist, but became Europe’s first professor of sociology in 1895. Spencer could not compete with this CV.
For Georg Hegel (1770–1831), a battle between ideas had been history’s change driver. Hegel rarely features in histories of sociological thought, though he has as strong a claim as Gumplowicz and de Gobineau, for whom the change driver was a struggle between races. For others, as explained above, the struggle was between simpler and more complex social organisms. Karl Marx and his collaborator and patron Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) had a different view: the change driver had been conflict between groups within societies. According to Marx and Engels, the protagonists were classes defined by their relationships to the means of production. This thinking cut across the previous assumption (too obvious to need defence) that societies were weakened by internal strife. Max Weber (1864–1920), a generation later, added that there could be classes in addition to owners and workers, and that conflict could also be about status and sometimes the pursuit of power for its own sake. These ideas earned Marx and Weber their reputations as classical social theorists.
Max Weber had German contemporaries who made lasting contributions to sociological thought. They included Ferdinand Toennies (1855–1936), who contrasted traditional Gemeinschaft societies where life was governed by ‘natural will’ that expressed instincts, habits and convictions, and where social relationships were emotional and co-operative, with Gesellschaft societies which were governed by rational will, where social relationships were contractual and impersonal, individualism ruled and life was competitive (Toennies, 1887). Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was another contemporary who first became famous internationally for his essay on the metropolis and mental life (Simmel, 1903), but has attracted renewed interest in the twenty-first century because he also wrote about the ‘financialisation’ of goods, services and social relationships (Simmel, 1900). Toennies and Simmel did not become ranked as major classical social theorists, not because their ideas were rejected, but because their theories were narrower in scope than those of Durkheim, Marx and Weber.
Part II of this book deals with successors to the classical theorists. The criteria for inclusion in Part II are necessarily different than those in Part I. Durkheim, Marx and Weber were declared founding fathers of sociology and classical theorists long after their deaths when it was decided that their ideas should be kept alive. Their successors are either still living or too recently deceased to apply an equivalent test. They are selected as major social theorists because their ideas have been and are still being used in most of sociology’s sub-disciplines, and sometimes in other subjects also. The exception is Norbert Elias (1897–1990). He is included because he does feature in the work of contemporary sports scholars, though rarely anywhere else.
Most of the successors in Part II have continued the classical agenda in offering reinterpretations of history, but a difference is that since Max Weber, social theorists have not attempted to explain the entire span of human history, but have restricted themselves to changes in Europe since the Middle Ages. Those who have offered such reinterpretations are Norbert Elias, the ‘critical theorists’ in Chapter 7 and Michel Foucault (1926–1984). Others are included in Part II for having offered a different ‘analytical’ type of theory. They begin with Talcott Parsons, who is in Part I because he became the bridge between pre-1939 European and American sociology, and also between the classical and successor theorists. Parsons endorsed Spencer’s and Durkheim’s view that the central trend throughout history had been a progressive division of labour, and that the explanation was that complex societies were stronger than simpler societies. He also offered an analytical theory, a set of inter-related concepts that can be used in the study of any society at any time and in any place. Symbolic interactionism, and the work of Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), are also analytical theories.
Part III deals with theories that are still being developed in the present. They continue the classical agenda in addressing the course of history, but here history begins in the late twentieth century. The theories are about the character of the latest modern age, in which virtually all spheres of life have changed during the absorption of new information and communication technology (ICT). ‘Post-industrial’, ‘globalisation’, ‘neo-liberal’, ‘knowledge economy’ and ‘information age’ are further keywords that help to define this new era.
The second ‘present’ chapter is about the latest versions of modernisation theory which are about the post-1989 world in which capitalism has become global. This has inspired a resuscitation of claims that throughout the world all societies are now on a common ‘modernising’ trajectory. ‘Resuscitation’ applies because ‘one common trajectory’ was the view in classical nineteenth-century theories of social evolution, and in development theories (the rest catching up with the most economically advanced societies) and an alleged convergence between capitalist and communist systems driven by a common ‘logic of industrialism’, that were propounded from the 1950s to the 1970s.
None of the theories in this book are presented in order to perform a demolition job. Each chapter tries to make the strongest possible case for the theory or theorist(s) that feature.
Sport and leisure studies
The case for sociology as the natural home for studying sport and leisure may be overwhelming on purely intellectual grounds, but this is not where sport and leisure first sank academic roots.
Europe has been the main source...
