The Playing Fields of Eton: Equality and Excellence in Modern Meritocracy

Four - Physical Culture for the Masses

::: four ::: Physical Culture for the Masses This chapter takes us into the twentieth century, but it begins in the world of the previous one. The puzzle here is why newly emerging working-class political organizations seemed so interested in sports. The answer is that they saw sports as thoroughly political and something they might be able to use for their political goals. Mass sports and mass politics developed roughly simultaneously in the second half of the nineteenth century. That simultaneity wasn’t a coincidence. As with the Victorians, here, too, the phenomenon we call physical culture re›ected broader social and political culture: Mass sports were ‹rst a consequence of some of the same forces that helped generate mass politics. They were also an important part of the mass politics, and they offered political movements an opportunity to debate what those politics ought to look like. I take up some of the debates in this chapter. The background includes the developments and debates we explored in the previous chapter. For example, the Victorians’ idea of moralized physical prowess enabled working classes and other representatives of the former “lower orders” to make claims for standing, even dignity. The mechanism is the same as in bourgeois dueling: a contingent understanding about the meaning of a practice can make it into a political tool that can be used even against precisely the ideas and values it is supposed to uphold. But this isn’t the only way in which mass sports are political, and that points to another fact we have encountered before: the use of such political weapons contains inherent tensions. The weapons might be duds, they might back‹re, and they might be blanks, offering satisfying bangs but ultimately no more than a political distraction. We encounter all of these positions in the debates about mass sports. In a related but broader sense, we might see the development of 106 mass sports as one way to bridge some of the political gaps we saw emerging in the previous chapter. One was between elite and ordinary practitioners, the other between sports as a kind of spectacle and sports as something that is participatory. In the nineteenth century, these two dimensions began to merge: elite practitioners were worth watching and even paying money to see. One way of understanding mass sports against that background is to see them as an attempt to develop a “democratic” conception of a practice. Here, the practice in question is sports, but the analogy to a broadly democratic citizenship is obvious to many of the people who write about these issues: getting the right to participate in and receiving political recognition for working-class sports organizations are akin to being recognized as a citizen. Related to this democratization is the almost Rousseauian desire evinced by some working-class sports organizations to bring spectacle and participation together: toward the end of his “Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre ,” Rousseau envisions a kind of participatory spectacle in which citizens engage in activities that express social as well as individual virtue—the former because of the latter.1 Although I don’t want to make too much of a theorist’s in›uence on the ideals of the practices, the Rousseauian connection isn’t entirely a coincidence. I look at this world through a wider lens. The previous chapter focused mainly on Victorian England. Now I move more freely. In the case of mass sports, the national varieties and international connections afford us a richer picture of both the phenomenon and the debates surrounding it. There is also an important political element: latenineteenth - and early-twentieth-century Europe (and to some extent North America) had an emerging, even vibrant, civil society existing alongside a state apparatus that was relatively weak in some cases and strong in others but barely democratic in most. Questions about the mechanisms with which one might or might not do politics and affect the state are up in the air. Leisure, Paternalism, and Social Control In this section, I consider some of the ways in which modern leisure re›ected attempts at paternalistic social control and how the nature of those attempts helped shape one feature in politicized class sports. Physical Culture for the Masses ::: 107 To engage in an amateur sport or other recreation requires two things: time and money. Higher social classes generally had enough of both, but in the nineteenth...