ABSTRACT
Western intellectual life in the late twentieth century seemed to be obsessed with ideas about epochs, periods and processes of history. Such ideas had played a much smaller part in the self-images of previous ages: the modest notions of an ‘era of progress’ or an ‘era of reform’ have little weight when compared with the supposed portentousness of ideas about ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’ and ‘globalization’. Quite apart from the instinctive scepticism which terms of such breadth and ambiguity ought to stimulate there was also an immediate paradox between the prevailing discourse in some fields, which was still of ‘modernization’, the movement to modernity, and others in which the orthodox thought was that we were moving away from or beyond modernity. For example, in debates about sport and the British constitution (especially after the election of ‘New Labour’ to power in 1997) the assumption was of reform in the direction of modernity. We were moving away from the hereditary principle and the amateur legacy and towards democracy and the more efficient operation of the market principle. However, in many other fields, often discussed by more exclusive circles, the assumption was of a move away from modernity: these included architecture and planning, but also cultural theory, literary criticism (in so far as it ever had been ‘modern’ in any acceptable sense) and the social sciences, especially in their aspiration and relation to the idea of ‘science’. It is, perhaps, tiresome of an author to remark on the overuse of these ideas and still insist of putting his own versions on the table, but I do think they can offer real insight into modern sport and can suggest interesting cross-fertilizations between a debate about sport and other contemporary debates. So, with apologies, some observations about modernity et al.
