프랑크푸르트학파의 사회철학과 스포츠비판

Abstract

The Frankfurt School, the most representative academic circle among neo-Marxist schools, paid a great attention to the critiques of capitalist societies in which human beings were heavily restricted and strongly manipulated, and looked for the human beings' autonomy and liberation. The School's social philosophy centered around the critiques of the instrumental reason and the capitalist cultural industry, and attempted to argue for the subjective and interpretive philosophical and scientific methodology. With the epistemological standpoint of the School, this study analyzed the contemporary sport dominated and controlled by the capitalist codes and norms. First, today's sport has been a form for increasing the instrumental reason; professional sport is a culmination of professionalization and specification derived from the specified division of labor for the productivity, utility, and efficiency. Athletes pursue the material values and rewards rather than the aesthetic values and their process for effort and devotion, and sport organizations emphasize the importance of operational efficiency and effectiveness based upon the capitalistic principles. Second, today's sport is criticized as a form of the capitalist cultural industry; sporting products seemed to be the consumers' false consciousness and then serve as an opiate for the mass who are forced to forget social problems and to become the one-dimensional people. Sport industry tends to deal with their people in terms of industrial mechanism; people used to be members of sport but they were customers and now are consumers who just pay money for sport. Third, the School's social philosophy suggests the critical interpretive methodology including the history, dialectics, and totality of society; in this standpoint, the human beings' social behaviors are viewed as subjective, interpretive, and sophisticated ones rather than superficially observed ones. Finally the School' social philosophy seem to make a great contribution to our critical perspectives about human imprisonment round sport and to become a practical body of knowledge about sport studies.