Jean-Marie Brohm

This is a collection of essays by French social theorist Jean-Marie Brohm written as a Marxist critique of sport. By sport, Brohm does not refer to the natural activities of play and exercise, but the phenomenon of institutionalized mass-sport (of which the Olympic games are the pinnacle). For Brohm, sport is an instrument of the bourgeois, a tool of indoctrination and exploitation that, thanks to its popularity and status in society, has remained free of social critique. This status applies equally to the totalitarian state monopoly of the former USSR as to the privatized bureaucracies of the Western world (these essays date back to the 1970s, so Cold War overtones are prevalent).

Brohm delivered what I felt to be a lively and insightful perspective on sport-as-institution, much of which I already agreed with to a large extent -- from sport as a distraction from genuine problems to its "colonization" by finance and corporate advertising -- albeit written from a vantage point that will be neither popular nor persuasive to those who aren't already sympathetic to the perspective offered by critical social theory (Marxist or otherwise).

As with all social critique it's important to realize the duality -- rarely will critique carry the absolute value of a wholly empirical science, and the reality is that modern capitalism, inclusive of sport, does bring about many positive benefits which must be acknowledged. The value of Brohm's critique is to bring to light issues which are often white-washed, if acknowledged at all, in order that we may give them all due consideration. When read in that sense, Brohm provides much to think about.… (mais)