ورزش و نئولیبرالیسم: یک تفسیر ایدئولوژی موثر Sport and Neoliberalism: An Affective-Ideological Articulation

Neoliberal Economics of Corporate Sport Although neoliberalism should never be completely reduced to economics, the form and function of economic ideas and institutions are arguably neoliberalism’s most discernible excrescences. Percolating over a number of decades following the end of the second World War—and informed by the pronouncements of Chicago School economists (including Ludwig von Mises, Frederich Hayek, George Stigler, and Milton Friedman) and other members of the Mont Pelerin Society (Mirowski and Piehwe; Peck)—by the beginning of the 1970s, an emergent neoliberal economic orthodoxy came to challenge the social welfare consensus that dominated the political economies of many western democracies in the immediate postwar world. Thus ensued the “great reversal” (Palley 6), which saw the Keynesian demand-side and socially redistributive economic approach systematically dismantled and subsequently replaced by a monetarist supply side approach, focused on stimulating the money supply within the economy. According to Richard Robison, this neoliberal economic revolution was forged by ideas pertaining to the advantages accrued by cultivating a largely unregulated (ideally self-regulating) and highly competitive economy in countering the perceived excesses and inefficiencies of Keynesian interventionism. This thinking rested on the notion that nurturing free trade and a concomitantly competitive market would lead to greater economic efficiencies and innovations, as well as the consequent stimulation of the money supply within the economy (the money supply previously drained by the perceived excesses of Keynesian demand-side redistributive investments). Continuous increases in productivity should, according to trickle-down neoliberal economic theory, deliver higher living standards to everyone from the thriving corporate capitalist to the manual worker now in full employment, meaning that the elimination of poverty can best be secured through the establishment and protection of free markets and free trade (Harvey, Brief History 64–65).