Doping und Enhancement (Volume 6) (English shop)

Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Pathologie gesellschaftlicher Leistungsorientierung

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Doping in sport has been the subject of a broad social and scientific discourse for around 100 years. Time and again, this discourse testifies to almost alchemical notions of a risk-free pharmacological self-transformation for the purpose of performance enhancement. The current discourse on neuroenhancement (“brain doping”) displays astonishing parallels to this. This book therefore attempts to learn from the history of doping for the current enhancement problem.

Doping is described here as a risk development that almost inevitably produces undesirable medical and social side effects. These, in turn, are liable to jeopardise the intended goals in the long term. The book examines how modern performance orientation was generated in the history of ideas and ethically charged, and how this evidently obstructs the view of the pathological aspects of this performance orientation in both sport and society.

Doping and enhancement are thus to be understood not merely as fraudulent acts by individuals, but rather as a desperate response by people to a hypertrophy of societal performance orientation. From this, conclusions are drawn for a broader strategy against drug abuse in sport and society. Prevention, however, can only be successful if the conditions under which modern societies generate performance are fundamentally questioned.