The Genesis of Sport as a Sociological Problem

Abstract

This study examines the physical and verbal genesis of sports in England and compares the conditions under which game–contests emerged in classical antiquity and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this aim, the investigation is guided by the theory of civilising processes, which posits that state formation and conscience formation, the level of socially permitted physical violence, and the threshold of repugnance against using it or witnessing it, will differ in specific ways at different stages in the development of societies. In this way, theory and empirical data together remove the misunderstanding that results from the unquestioned use of one’s own threshold of repugnance in the face of specific types of physical violence as a general yardstick for all human societies regardless of their structure and stage of social development.