The Twentieth Century: Was It a Century for Sports?

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  • スポーツの20世紀
  • スポーツ ノ 20セイキ

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Abstract

The 20th century has been made from, among others, three awkward materials: a) ever growing political monsters called nation states, b) the intertwining of a market economy, which was not quite free at all, and giant corporations, c) science & technology, which did not altogether mean science on the one hand and technology on the other in the lesser degree, but rather merchandisable technological R&D's leading science toward so-called consumer “needs”<br>At the beginning of the 1990s, E. Hobsbawm paid attention to “sports” as one of the bridging agents for the incongruous cleft between the “public” and the “private” world within nation states. Around a century ago, T. Veblen already made a series of sharp diagnoses on the coming century; that it would have corporations nominally run by absentee ownership, but actually by a huge stratum of white collar populations whose identities could be found nowhere else except as the “leisure class”. Recently, US sociologist Stuart Ewen made clear that these diagnoses are truer than he had expected.<br>The present paper re-examines these important precedents in the study of this century and argues that sociologists in sports, as well as those in any other fields, should not lose sight of the above mentioned three weird ingredients of the century. At the end of the 20th century, it proposes a question that, although the century seemed to enjoy various kinds of prosperous sports and related activities, was it reality or not entirely?

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