توماس لوكمان

الأعمال

• 1966البناء الاجتماعي للواقع

  بحث في سوسيولوجيا المعرفة: المجتمع نتاج إنساني، والمجتمع واقع موضوعي، والإنسان نتاج اجتماعي.

• 1967الدين غير المرئي (The Invisible Religion)

  لا يختفي الدين في المجتمع الحديث؛ بل يغادر الكنائس ويصير شأنًا خاصًّا للمعنى الفردي.

الموقف

With Berger, Luckmann gave the sociology of knowledge a new subject: not the ideas of intellectuals but the everyday knowledge by which people orient themselves. Habits become institutions, institutions are legitimated by stories and theories, and each new generation internalises them as simply the way the world is; society is a human product and at the same time an objective reality. In his study of religion (German 1963; enlarged as The Invisible Religion, 1967) Luckmann criticised a sociology of religion that counted church attendance. Religion, he argued, is the capacity of human beings to transcend their biological nature by building worlds of meaning; in modern societies it does not disappear but leaves the churches and becomes a private assortment of meanings – the self, family, sexuality, self-realisation. Critics objected that so broad a concept of religion includes almost everything, even football. In Konstanz he turned to the sociology of communication and studied “communicative genres” – fixed patterns such as gossip, conversion stories or moral sermons – through which societies pass on knowledge and morality. His students, among them Hubert Knoblauch, built on this in what became known as “communicative constructivism”.

الحياة والسياق

Thomas Luckmann was born in 1927 in Jesenice, then in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia from 1929), today in Slovenia, to an Austrian father and a Slovenian mother. He studied philosophy and linguistics in Vienna and Innsbruck and in 1950 emigrated to the United States, where he studied at the New School for Social Research in New York with Alfred Schutz and took his doctorate in 1956. After teaching at Hobart College and the New School he became professor in Frankfurt in 1965, and in 1970 at the new University of Konstanz, where he taught until 1994. Together with Peter L. Berger, his friend from the New School, he wrote The Social Construction of Reality (1966). After Schutz’s death he completed The Structures of the Life-World from Schutz’s notes (German 1975 and 1984). He died at his home in Carinthia in 2016.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• The Social Construction of Reality (with Peter L. Berger, 1966)
• The Structures of the Life-World (with Alfred Schutz, 1975/1984)
• Theory of Social Action (Theorie des sozialen Handelns, 1992)