Peter Berger

Dzieła

• 1966Społeczne tworzenie rzeczywistości

  Traktat z socjologii wiedzy: społeczeństwo jest wytworem człowieka, społeczeństwo jest rzeczywistością obiektywną, człowiek jest wytworem społecznym.

• 1967Święty baldachim

  Religia jako najdalej idąca próba nadania społecznie zbudowanemu światu kosmicznego porządku – i dlaczego pluralizm go nadwątla.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• Invitation to Sociology (1963)
• The Social Construction of Reality (with Thomas Luckmann, 1966)
• The Sacred Canopy (1967)
• A Rumor of Angels (1969)
• The Homeless Mind (with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, 1973)
• The Many Altars of Modernity (2014)