Football and Bull Fights

"It has been said, not inaptly, that the relation of football to physical culture is much the same as that of the bull-fight to agriculture." (160) --Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1994 Dover edition)

Veblen was not much of a football fan, was he? He wrote this in 1899. If you haven't read any Victorian texts recently, "physical culture" was the term then used for exercise and maintaining good physical fitness. Veblen's larger point is that football accentuates archaic human traits of predation and barbarism that are little economic use to a society. His ideas were part of the popular late 19th century ideology of social evolution. (You are probably more familiar with Herbert Spencer as social evolution's main advocate.) Veblen thought the evolution of the human species is driven by the natural selection of traits that enable humanity to progressively produce more wealth. For Veblen, it all comes down to whether certain human traits are useful in an economic sense. Apparently, football does not make the cut!

The Theory of the Leisure Class is a classic of economics and sociology. I would recommend it for its unique descriptions and explanations of Victorian upper class society--which, by the way, can be largely adapted to Americans of all classes today. His observations of the upper class's "conspicuous consumption" help one to understand why contemporary Americans (and probably all of Western society) are obsessed with consuming goods--cars, clothing, houses, etc--in order to remain "respectable" to their neighbors. However, Veblen's book is awfully convoluted. The organization of his arguments within chapters is sometimes hard to distinguish. I think he could have written this book using half the number of pages--and been better off for it.