Peter L. Berger
People make society, society then feels like hard reality and shapes the people who made it – and religion has long been the canopy that makes this world feel meaningful.
Placement
Vienna-born American sociologist: society is a human product, yet it confronts us as objective reality and shapes us in turn; religion once gave this world a “sacred canopy”. He later withdrew his own forecast that modernity would bring secularisation.
Key ideas
- Externalisation, objectivation, internalisation
- The sacred canopy
- Desecularisation and pluralism
Teachers: Alfred Schutz
Influence
Influenced by 5
Karl Marx
influenced by
With Luckmann, Berger took over Marx’s dialectic of humans producing a world that confronts them as objective, and his concept of reification (The Social Construction of Reality, 1966). P. L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966); P. L. Berger and S. Pullberg, “Reification and the Sociological Critique of Consciousness”, History and Theory 4 (1965)
Evidence: AI draft
Karl Marx › 1818–1883
Émile Durkheim
influenced by
In The Sacred Canopy (1967) Berger used Durkheim’s concepts of the sacred and of anomie: religion shields the socially constructed order, the nomos, against the terror of anomy. P. L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967); É. Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912)
Evidence: AI draft
Émile Durkheim › 1858–1917
George Herbert Mead
influenced by
Berger grounded his view of identity as socially bestowed, sustained and transformed in Mead’s account of the self formed by taking others’ roles (Invitation to Sociology, 1963). P. L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology (1963), “Society in Man”; SEP “George Herbert Mead”
Evidence: AI draft
George Herbert Mead › 1863–1931
Max Weber
influenced by
In The Sacred Canopy (1967) Berger took up Weber’s theodicy and disenchantment, arguing that Protestantism’s rationalisation of religion prepared its own secularisation. P. L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (1967); M. Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904–05); SEP “Max Weber”
Evidence: AI draft
Max Weber › 1864–1920
Alfred Schutz studied with
studied with
Berger studied at the New School for Social Research in New York (MA 1950, PhD 1954), where he attended the courses of Schutz, who taught there. P. L. Berger, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (2011)
Evidence: AI draft
Alfred Schutz › 1899–1959
Works
A treatise in the sociology of knowledge: society is a human product, society is an objective reality, the human being is a social product.
Religion as the most far-reaching attempt to give the socially built world a cosmic order – and why pluralism erodes it.
Position
The Social Construction of Reality, written with Thomas Luckmann, joins Schutz’s phenomenology of everyday life to Marx, Weber, Durkheim and George Herbert Mead. Three moments describe the relation between people and society: through externalisation people produce a world, through objectivation this world takes on a reality of its own, and through internalisation, beginning in childhood, it shapes those who live in it. Berger applied this to religion in The Sacred Canopy (1967): religion is the most ambitious attempt to give the socially built world the status of a cosmic order; when many worldviews compete, this canopy loses its plausibility, and modernity seemed bound to secularise. Thirty years later Berger reversed himself. In The Desecularization of the World (1999) he noted that most of the world was as religious as ever, with western Europe and Western academics as the exceptions, and in The Many Altars of Modernity (2014) he argued that modernity produces pluralism rather than secularity. Politically he moved from the critical mood of the 1960s towards a neoconservative position; in Pyramids of Sacrifice (1974) he weighed the human costs of both capitalist and socialist development. Critics saw in the Social Construction a theory that underplays power and conflict, while its title became a phrase applied to almost anything.
Life & context
Peter Ludwig Berger was born in Vienna in 1929 to a family of Jewish origin that had converted to Lutheranism. After the annexation of Austria in 1938 the family fled to Palestine, and in 1946 he moved to New York. He studied at Wagner College and at the New School for Social Research, where Alfred Schutz taught him; he took his doctorate in 1954. He first thought of becoming a Lutheran minister and remained a practising Lutheran all his life. He taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Hartford Seminary, the New School, Rutgers and Boston College, and from 1981 at Boston University, where in 1985 he founded the institute later known as the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. His Invitation to Sociology (1963) became one of the most widely read introductions to the subject. He was married to the sociologist Brigitte Berger. He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2017.
Further main works
- Invitation to Sociology (1963)
- A Rumor of Angels (1969)
- The Homeless Mind (with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, 1973)
- The Many Altars of Modernity (2014)
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