ABSTRACT
While there was an active group of scholars in the 1970s and 1980s exploring sport and society from the left, particularly those influenced by the theoretical work of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci and the more recent work in cultural studies by Raymond Williams and in social history by E.P. Thompson,1 leftist critiques of sport in society largely became subsumed by a postmodern mishmash by the 1990s and early 2000s. There was a brief period where historical sociology opened up space for the understanding of the role of sport in the construction and maintenance of class differences and in the resistance to forms of domination. Douglas Booth argues that this emerged out of political activism in sport that appeared in the 1960s, which influenced an ‘emerging generation of sports historians’. He argues further that the work of Raymond Williams, particularly his approach to hegemony gave ‘left-leaning sports historians . . . the tool to escape the reductionism and determinism of structural Marxism and include expressions of agency while accounting for the ongoing dominance of capitalist structures’. He goes further to suggest that the appeal of hegemony ‘owed just as much to the politics of disappointment in the face of growing conservatism in the 1980s’.2 Most historians of sport largely focused on criticising leftist works drawing on social theories as not adhering closely enough to historical ‘evidence’ as they strove to reconstruct the sporting past. In particular, much attention was given over to ‘mining the sources’ and while class did appear in a number of excellent works of sport history since the mid-1990s, those works have largely been marginalised in favour of studies examining race, gender, space and place, representation, etc. Those on the left sought to explain the role of sport in the co-opting of working classes and in the maintenance of capitalist hegemony.
