{"id":195561,"date":"2026-06-25T10:59:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T18:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195561"},"modified":"2026-06-25T12:01:31","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T20:01:31","slug":"allen-guttmann-and-the-myth-of-rational-secularization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=195561","title":{"rendered":"Allen Guttmann and the Myth of Rational Secularization"},"content":{"rendered":"

Allen Guttmann<\/a> (b. 1932) keeps an office at Amherst College<\/a>, brick and bell and the long New England light, and on the shelves stand his own books in several languages. He reads them all. The field calls him sui generis, a polymath, erudite and dry. He came up from Chicago through Florida and Columbia and Minnesota and arrived at one of the small colleges that train the sons of the American managerial class, and there he spent forty years writing about games. Not playing them. Counting them. He counted the way other men pray.<\/p>\n

His best-known book carries its argument in its title. From Ritual to Record (1978) draws a line from the ancient contest to the modern one and names seven traits that mark the modern side: secularism, equality of access and conditions, the splitting of roles, rationalization, bureaucratic order, quantification, and the quest for records. He read Max Weber<\/a> (1864-1920) and saw in the stopwatch the same disenchantment Weber saw in the office and the ledger. The Greek ran at Olympia to honor Zeus. The festival was a rite. The prize was a wreath and a place in the order of the gods. The modern man runs against a number. The number is the point.<\/p>\n

Guttmann saw what the number replaced. He wrote it down. With the gods gone from the mountain, a man can no longer run to save his soul, so he sets a record instead. That, Guttmann wrote, is a modern immortality. The line sits near the end of his second chapter, cool as a coroner’s note, and it is the most important sentence he ever wrote, because in it a sport historian states the thesis of Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) without naming him.<\/p>\n

Becker’s claim runs like this. A man knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge, so he builds a project that will outlast his body and attaches his name to it. Culture supplies the projects. Religion, nation, art, money, the bloodline, the great book, the broken record. Each is a hero system, a set of rules that tells a man what counts as significance and lets him feel he has earned a place above mere decay. The terror of death is the engine. The sacred value is whatever the hero system places at its center, the thing a man will not trade and cannot see around.<\/p>\n

So Guttmann, charting the move from ritual to record, charted a migration of the sacred. He thought he was describing a loss, the draining of the holy out of the contest. He was describing a relocation. The sacred did not leave the stadium. It moved from the altar to the clock.<\/p>\n

Hold the word still and watch it pass through hands.<\/p>\n

A sofer sits in a back room in Brooklyn with a quill and a hide and copies the Torah letter by letter. He checks each one against the master. A single malformed letter voids the scroll. For him the record is the text, transmitted without change across three thousand years, and his bid against death is fidelity. He adds nothing. He alters nothing. The immortality is in the not-changing, in standing inside an unbroken chain and handing the same letters forward. To set a new record here would be the sin. The record is the old one, kept.<\/p>\n

Cut to a swimming hall in Magdeburg<\/a> in the 1970s. A physician for the East German state hands a teenage girl small blue pills and calls them vitamins. The record she will break belongs to the German Democratic Republic<\/a> before it belongs to her. Her body is evidence in a contest between two systems, and the time on the board is a sentence in an argument about which way of organizing men is true. The record proves the regime. When the regime falls the records stand in the books with an asterisk of suspicion, and the girl carries the chemistry in her bones, and the immortality the doctors chased dies with the country that chased it. Guttmann’s own index lists Kornelia Ender<\/a> (b. 1958) and East Germany. He knew the contest was never only athletic.<\/p>\n

Cut to Mali<\/a>, a courtyard, a griot<\/a> who carries in his chest the genealogy of a family for nine generations and sings it at the wedding. His record lives in breath. Nothing is written. The line survives if he trains a son to hold it and dies if he does not. Here the record is not a number and not a scroll. It is a living man, and the immortality is oral, warm, and one death from extinction.<\/p>\n

Cut to a family history center in Utah<\/a>, fluorescent light, a retired engineer at a microfilm reader. He pulls a name out of a parish register in Lancashire<\/a>, a girl dead in 1781, and enters her into the file so that the ordinance can be done and the dead woman bound to the living family forever. For him the record rescues the dead from oblivion and offers them a place in the eternal household. The genealogy is salvation. The record saves souls, which is the exact office Guttmann said the modern record had abandoned.<\/p>\n

Cut to a studio in Hackensack<\/a> at two in the morning, a drummer on his fourth take. For him the record is the pressing, the fixed thing cut into the lacquer, and he distrusts it, because the take freezes one night and calls it the truth and buries the hundred better nights that were never miked. His art lives in the room, once, and dies when the room empties. The record is the embalming. He chases it anyway, because the embalming is the only version that outlives the gig.<\/p>\n

Cut to a hotel ballroom and an adjudicator from London with a clipboard and a rulebook thick as a phone directory, here to certify the longest fingernails in the world. For him the record is spectacle democratized, a slot any man can fill if he counts the right thing long enough, and the book he serves sells the promise that anyone, doing anything, can purchase a sliver of permanence at the price of one absurd devotion.<\/p>\n

Cut, last, to a folding table in a community hall where a man who survived a thing the century would rather forget gives his testimony into a recorder, and says, for the record, the names of the dead. Here the record is the wall against denial. It does not measure achievement. It refuses erasure. The immortality is moral and the enemy is not time but the lie.<\/p>\n

One word. Seven hero systems. The sofer’s record forbids the new mark the swimmer’s record demands. The griot’s record dies with a man the genealogist’s record rescues from death. The drummer’s pressing betrays the night the witness’s recording redeems. Each man would hear the others use the word and assume they meant the same thing. None of them do. The word is a coin that buys a different immortality at every counter.<\/p>\n

Guttmann saw this clearer than almost anyone, for one species of the word. He built a whole comparative scheme on the gap between the Greek wreath and the modern number. And here the essay turns, because the man who anatomized the sacred life of the record was running a hero system of his own, and his was the one he could not see.<\/p>\n

His sacred value is the durable scholarly contribution. The clean count. The thesis that holds. He prized the empirical and suspected the ideological, and he said so, and he aimed his cool prose at the Marxists and the romantics who he thought let their wishes drive their findings. He wanted to be right, and to stay right, and to be cited by the small number of people who decide what the field knows. That is a faith. The faith has an altar, and the altar is the record, the scholarly kind, the book that outlasts the body and carries the name forward into the conversation of the dead and the unborn.<\/p>\n

Then France. A generation of French historians took up From Ritual to Record and would not leave it alone. One of them, Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Loudcher, wrote that Guttmann’s refusal to give up the thesis across the decades raised a question about its scientific standing, about whether the field returned to it out of need rather than proof. Read that as a Becker reading it. A man defends an immortality project past the point where the evidence compels him, not from stubbornness, but because the project is the thing standing between him and the void it was built to deny. You do not surrender the altar. The altar is what makes the death survivable.<\/p>\n

He guarded the altar with irony, which is the priest’s oldest tool. In Sports: The First Five Millennia (2004) he opens by confessing that “No one knows enough to write such a book,” and then he writes it. The confession is a status move and a defense at once. Admit the insufficiency first, in your own dry voice, and no critic can wound you with it, and the project goes forward under cover of the admission. Becker would recognize the maneuver. The man who jokes about the impossibility of the cathedral is still building the cathedral.<\/p>\n

In 2001 the International Olympic Committee<\/a> gave him its research prize. Consider the symmetry. The man who described how modern sport turned the sacred contest into a secular record received, from the bureaucratic order at the center of that very transformation, a record of his own achievement, a name entered in the book of those the movement honors. The Olympic apparatus canonized the scholar who told it what it had become. He took the medal. Why would he not. It is the immortality his own hero system recognizes.<\/p>\n

The counter got counted. The record keeper got kept. Guttmann stood on the bank of the river Weber described, the long current that carries the holy out of the world and leaves the disenchanted plain behind, and he measured the flow with care, and he thought he stood on dry ground. Becker’s whole point is that there is no dry ground. The measuring is a hero system too. The clean number is an altar. The book that holds the thesis for forty years against the French is a bid against oblivion as old as the wreath at Olympia and the scroll in the back room in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

He wrote that the modern man, unable to run for his soul, runs for a record. He was describing himself at the desk, in several languages, counting the counters, setting a mark he hoped would stand.<\/p>\n

‘A Big Misunderstanding’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

If David Pinsof is right, Guttmann\u2019s framework misreads why we turned sports into a math project. What Guttmann viewed as a historical shift toward Weberian rationalization was a massive technological upgrade for human competitive instincts.
\nGuttmann spent a lot of time analyzing the modern obsession with records and statistics. To a sociologist, tracking a baseball player’s on-base percentage down to the third decimal place seems like a feature of modern bureaucratic rationality.
\nPinsof\u2019s essay says that this quantification is not a byproduct of an industrial mindset. It is a highly strategic tool used to settle dominance disputes without ambiguity. In a primitive tribe, status might be contested through physical violence or shifting social alliances, which are messy and carry high costs. Modern sports statistics provide a clean, undeniable hierarchy. A record is a tool to say: “I am mathematically better than you, and you cannot argue out of it.”We did not become obsessed with records because society became modern; we became obsessed with records because humans love to dominate rivals, and precise numbers make that dominance absolute.
\nIn works like Sports Spectators, Guttmann and other sports sociologists often grapple with the dark sides of fandom: hooliganism, intense tribal loyalty, and the irrational hatred of opposing teams. The academic instinct is to treat this behavior as a malfunction\u2014a form of primitive tribalism or a lack of education that can be cured through better stadium management, community outreach, or psychological interventions.
\nFrom Pinsof\u2019s perspective, partisan hatred in sports is not a whoopsie. It is a feature, not a bug. Fans do not hate the opposing team because they have a cognitive bias or because they misunderstand the arbitrary nature of sports. They hate them because sports are a low-stakes simulator of zero-sum coalitional warfare. Demonizing the competition, embellishing their flaws, and fiercely defending your own side are useful tactics to win the status game. The academic who tries to study the “irrationality” of the sports fan is just missing the point: the fan is acting rationally according to his actual evolutionary motive, which is to experience collective triumph over a rival coalition.
\nGuttmann\u2019s career represents a classic intellectual maneuver. By taking sports\u2014a raw, visceral arena of physical dominance, status-seeking, and reproductive signaling\u2014and turning it into a subject for a Ph.D. curriculum, Guttmann built a professional monopoly over a popular pastime.
\nBefore the rise of sports history, a sports fan or an athlete understood exactly what he was doing: he was trying to win, look good, and beat the other guy. By introducing high theory, sociology, and anthropology into the mix, Guttmann positioned the university professor as the ultimate arbiter of what sports “actually” mean.
\nIf Pinsof is right, the athlete is the one who understands reality perfectly. He knows he is competing for resources, status, and prestige. The academic is the one introducing a big misunderstanding. The intellectual invents a complex narrative about “secularization” and “social structures” to justify his own seat at the top of the cultural hierarchy, looking down on the raw competition of the masses while collecting a paycheck for analyzing the very hole everyone is playing in.<\/p>\n

The Great Delusion<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities<\/em><\/a>, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:<\/p>\n

\nMy view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism\u2014everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights\u2014and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. \u201cHuman rights,\u201d Samuel Moyn notes, \u201chave come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities\u2014state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.\u201d
\n[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization…\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If John J. Mearsheimer is right, his anthropology undercuts the sociological framework of Allen Guttmann (born October 13, 1932), whose 1978 book From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports serves as a foundational text for the academic study of modern athletics.
\nGuttmann argues that the evolution of sports reflects the broader transition of Western society from sacred, traditional rituals into modern, secular, and rationalized bureaucratic structures. He identifies seven distinct characteristics of modern sports that mirror the rise of the industrial, liberal state: secularism, equality of opportunity to compete, specialization of roles, rationalization of rules, bureaucratic organization, quantification of performance, and the obsession with breaking records. For Guttmann, modern sports are an expressive outgrowth of a highly rationalized world where science, mathematics, and efficiency govern human achievement. Mearsheimer’s realism upends Guttmann’s paradigm by showing that what looks like social modernization is actually a sublimation of human tribalism.
\nGuttmann tracks the shift “from ritual to record,” claiming that sports shed their ancient, religious, and sacred roots to become secular activities measured by precise, mathematical calculation. If Mearsheimer is right, this secularization is only a surface adjustment. Humans are tribal at their core and rely on group cohesion for survival. The intense emotional investment, the collective myths, and the clear Us-versus-Them divisions found in modern sports are not remnants of an outdated ritualistic past that reason has tamed. They are the permanent, active expressions of our tribal nature. Modern sports did not become rationalized; rather, our primal tribal impulses adopted the vocabulary of quantification and record-keeping to continue the ancient logic of group competition.
\nGuttmann posits that modern sports embrace the liberal ideal of equality, where achievement is based purely on merit and performance rather than on inherited status or social class. Mearsheimer’s anthropology, supported by alliance theory, implies that this meritocratic ideal is an ideological badge used by elite coalitions. The rules and bureaucracies governing modern sports do not exist to ensure abstract fairness for atomistic individuals; they exist to manage reputations, regulate competition between rival groups, and enforce compliance within the coalition. The level playing field Guttmann describes is a useful fiction that masks the continuous struggle for power, status, and collective dominance inside the sporting institution.
\nGuttmann views the modern obsession with quantification and breaking records as a product of a scientific, calculating mind that seeks to push the boundaries of individual human potential. Mearsheimer\u2019s hierarchy of preferences places reason and individual achievement last, far behind the survival drives of the social group. By this reading, a sports record is not a monument to human reason or individual progress. It is a tool for group prestige and collective signaling. States and societies invest immense resources into producing record-breakers\u2014such as during the Olympic Games\u2014not out of a detached admiration for athletic perfection, but to advertise the vitality, discipline, and power of their particular tribe to the rest of an anarchic world.
\nGuttmann relies heavily on Max Weber’s theories of modernization, arguing that the specialization of athletic roles (like specific positions in soccer or football) and the rise of bureaucratic governing bodies (like FIFA or the IOC) reflect the cold, efficient rationality of modern life.
\nMearsheimer’s realism suggests a more primitive purpose for these structures. A highly specialized and bureaucratized sports team is not an expression of modern bureaucratic drift; it is a highly disciplined combat unit. Humans survived throughout history by organizing themselves into tightly coordinated bands to outcompete rival groups. The division of labor on a sports field and the strict hierarchy of coaching staffs mimic the exact structures needed for group survival and warfare under conditions of anarchy. The bureaucracy does not tame the tribal instinct; it weaponizes it, making the collective unit far more formidable in its pursuit of victory over the enemy.
\nA cornerstone of Guttmann’s thesis is the rationalization of rules\u2014the idea that modern sports are governed by universal, codified laws that apply equally to every competitor regardless of their origin. Guttmann sees this as a triumph of the liberal-legal framework.
\nMearsheimer’s view of international relations and human nature shows that this universalism is a fragile veneer. Just as international law fails to constrain powerful states when their survival or core interests are at stake, the universal rules of sports are constantly subverted by tribal loyalty. When a referee makes a controversial call, fans and players do not react as detached, rational observers who respect the abstract rulebook. They react with immediate, unreflective tribal outrage, viewing the decision entirely through the prism of whether it helps or harms their side. The rational rulebook only holds as long as the competition remains low-stakes; the moment an existential threat to group pride or dominance emerges, the universalist illusion vanishes, and raw tribal warfare returns.
\nBecause Guttmann views modern sports as inherently rationalized and secular, extreme phenomena like soccer hooliganism or mass fan riots appear as pathological deviations from the modern norm\u2014breakdowns where the rational system temporarily fails to contain atavistic impulses.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s anthropology says that Guttmann misdiagnoses the situation. Fan violence is not a breakdown of the sporting system; it is the logical fulfillment of its underlying tribal nature. The intense value infusion individuals receive from their community during childhood creates an unbreakable bond to the group’s symbols, colors, and territory. For the hard-core supporter, the sports franchise is the literal survival vehicle for his social identity. When that identity is threatened by a rival group, the thin restraint of individual reason collapses instantly. The fan who fights in the streets is not a broken modern citizen; he is the quintessential tribal man defending his coalition against an invading tribe.
\nGuttmann implicitly links the rise of modern sports to the progress of the peaceful, internal order of the liberal state, where physical violence is minimized and channeled into regulated play.
\nMearsheimer\u2019s worldview is tragic and static, denying that human society ever truly escapes the shadow of conflict. By his reading, modern sports did not emerge because humanity became more civilized or rational. Sports exist because the international arena remains fundamentally anarchic, and the human drive for group dominance can never be erased. Athletics provide a structured arena for simulated warfare, allowing groups to achieve the psychological rewards of territorial conquest, collective dominance, and tribal triumph without the literal destruction of total war. Modern sports are not a monument to human progress; they are a necessary safety valve for an unchanging, dangerous, and tribal species.
\nIf Mearsheimer is right, Guttmann\u2019s theory reads the modern sporting apparatus backward. Modern sports are not a clean break from our primitive past into a rational, bureaucratic era. They are a highly organized survival vehicle, providing the exact structure needed to channel our permanent, unreflective tribal loyalties under the guise of modern entertainment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Allen Guttmann (b. 1932) keeps an office at Amherst College, brick and bell and the long New England light, and on the shelves stand his own books in several languages. He reads them all. The field calls him sui generis, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t