A Foundation of Critical, Emancipatory Social History

Historians of sport have established a vibrant and productive academic field with dozens of texts now qualifying as “classics.” Richard Gruneau's Class, Sports, and Social Development (1983) is one. When I commenced my PhD in the late 1980s, Class, Sports, and Social Development yielded an unprecedented breadth of intellectual and theoretical insights to critique the power structures and imbalances in, and the ideological dimensions of, modern sport.1 Upon receiving Dain TePoel's invitation to review a classic in the field, I immediately thought of Class, Sports, and Social Development, which I consider a foundational text of critical, emancipatory social history. This genre quickly became the dominant historical approach in the field in the 1980s and ’90s and, notwithstanding the steadily growing impact of the cultural turn, continues to underpin much sport history.Unlike some modernist-inspired historians who study the past for “its own sake” and who (allegedly) detach themselves from their subjects, contemporary concerns, and social and political conditions,2 many social historians see the past “as a site of suffering and ethical transgression,” conceptualize themselves as “part of a larger emancipatory mission,”3 empathize with, and perhaps even advocate for, the empowerment of minorities and women, and implicitly—and occasionally explicitly—channel their narratives from the past to the future.4Class, Sports, and Social Development was integral to the critical, emancipatory turn in sports studies. Written in the late 1970s and early ’80s during a fundamental restructuring of global capitalism after three decades of unheralded economic prosperity, the book challenged the theoretical and methodological orthodoxy of structural functionalism and instrumental positivism in sports studies that ignored state power, social inequalities, and discrimination.A slightly amended version of Gruneau's PhD dissertation, Class, Sports, and Social Development embodied the emerging intellectual environment of sport studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Although Gruneau completed his PhD in the Department of Sociology, he was a highly influential student leader in the university's new department of sport studies.5In Class, Sports, and Social Development, Gruneau adopted C. Wright Mills's perspective on historical sociology; Anthony Giddens's notions of power, agency and structure; Antonio Gramsci's approach to cultural studies; and Marxist concepts of political economy. The result was a synthetic and multidimensional approach to sport that combined “social theory with history, interpretative cultural analysis, and political economy.”6 Gruneau begins the text with a careful dissection and meticulous evaluation of existing theoretical perspectives of play and sport and proceeds to an alternative nonreductive theory for the social analysis of sport. At the heart of this theory is a central proposition: “The different resources that agents bring to bear on their social situation . . . [is] an axial concept linking problems of human agency to problems of structural change and social development.”7 In other words, sport is a practice constituted through broad social structures that open and close possibilities and choices for human action. Gruneau tested the theory against the trilogy of class, sport, and social development in Canada. In the context of critical, emancipatory social history, Gruneau's sharp eye on social conflict highlighted middle-class efforts to control the recreational activities of the working classes, the tensions between amateurism and professionalism, the struggle to organize athletic labor, and the influences of commercial sport in the United States and the mass media. Gruneau championed a “politically engaged and partial ‘reading’” of the past “written from a certain point of view, rather than an objective and full account of historical ‘facts.’”8 While this view offended, and continues to offend, some modernist-inspired sport historians, today it can be considered a broadly mainstream position in sport history.9In his foreword to Class, Sports, and Social Development (1983), Gruneau's PhD supervisor, the eminent sociologist Charles Page, refers to the then-young author as “a superior sociologist . . . whose works are enhanced by careful attention to historical context” and “the historian-critics E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams.”10 Gruneau's optimism in the capacity and ability of agents to transform the limiting and constraining structures of sport was one of the book's strengths identified by R. W. Connell in his foreword to the Human Kinetics edition of the book.11In a postscript in the 1999 Human Kinetics edition, Gruneau reflected on the original text. New social concerns at the end of the twentieth century were an apposite context for reflection. Among those concerns were racial and ethnic nationalism, racism, sexual violence against women, AIDS, gay rights, environmental degradation, postcolonial economic development, social access for the physically disabled, and political rights for the intellectually impaired. New theoretical perspectives from feminism and Foucauldian notions of power (e.g., rapidly changing political alignments, and constant sensitivity to, and respect for, social differentiation, heterogeneity, and multiplicity) also precipitated reflection. Gruneau acknowledged that contemporary issues “require new concepts and fresh perspectives” and warned against focusing solely on the way capitalism “shape[s] the dominant structures of . . . sporting practice.”12 Nonetheless, he reminded readers not to lose sight of persisting institutionalized and total forms of power and the ongoing need for “broad collective struggle.”13 Pointing to the future, Gruneau advocated for “better history,” his definition of which aligned with critical, emancipatory social history: “analyze the broadest possible range of experiences of oppression and sites of opposition,” and listen to “the broadest possible range of [marginalized] voices.”14 His definition of “better history,” moreover, merged with the closer attention that cultural historians paid to the ambiguities, inconsistencies, “contradictions and . . . unintended consequences of human action.”15Eighteen years after the postscript in Class, Sports, and Social Development (1999), Polity Press published Gruneau's Sport and Modernity (2017). The text can be read as a sequel to his conceptualization of critical, emancipatory sport history which, in the intervening years, was influenced by a plethora of theorists (e.g., Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, David Harvey, Jean-François Lyotard, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak), who Gruneau acknowledges introduced “extremely important resources . . . [to] . . . social criticism in sport studies.”16 In Sport and Modernity, Gruneau continues his advocacy for critical social theory which he (re)defines as a “commitment” to understanding the “‘totality’ of social relations” through the lens of political economy which, ultimately, is an inescapable macro-context for social history.17 Social history remains a bulwark of Gruneau's analysis. For example, he argues that material conditions, including international sporting spectacles such as the olympic games, helped reify the abstract concepts of sport and modernity and contributed to “staging” the latter. Strands of cultural history also appear. In an historical analysis of the codification of modern sport in the nineteenth century, Gruneau describes a set of fragmented, contradictory, and contested ideas about athletics in ancient Greece and spectacles in ancient Rome which, he argues, were resynthesized into an enduring view and belief that sport constitutes an autonomous cultural practice with its own qualities and values.Finally, Gruneau applies critical social theory to an interrogation of sport for development initiatives and mega-sporting events such as the olympic games. His conclusion is balanced. While critiques of development policies and strategies leave no doubt that sport cannot “substantially reduce global poverty,” well-planned and led sport programs can at least facilitate positive experiences for young people in impoverished communities.18 In the tradition of critical, emancipatory social history, Sport and Modernity foregrounds the ongoing need for broad collective action. Here Gruneau cites Seoul's forced evictions and relocations of 720,000 urban underclasses to accommodate sport-related infrastructure for the 1988 olympic games, and Beijing's removal of 1.25 million for 2008.19From Class, Sports, and Social Development to Sport and Modernity, Richard Gruneau has actively engaged with critical, emancipatory social history. His clear explication and skillful application of this analytical approach will ensure that his work remains essential reading for students and scholars in the field for many decades to come. That is the definition of a classic.