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Peter L. Berger (1929–2017)

Peter Ludwig Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist, best known as co-author with Thomas Luckmann of The Social Construction of Reality (1966), one of the most influential works of twentieth-century sociology. Across a long career he worked chiefly in two areas — the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion — and was, for the general reader, among the most widely read sociologists of his generation, writing with a clarity and wit unusual in the discipline. He is also notable for having publicly reversed one of his own central theses, abandoning the secularisation theory he had helped make standard.

Peter Ludwig Berger (17 March 1929 – 27 June 2017) was born in Vienna and emigrated to the United States shortly after the Second World War. He studied at Wagner College and then at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he came under the decisive influence of the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. He taught at several institutions, including Rutgers and Boston College, and from 1981 until his retirement in 2009 at Boston University, where he founded and directed the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs.

The social construction of reality

Berger’s most enduring work is the 1966 treatise written with Luckmann, his friend and fellow student under Schutz. It reframed the sociology of knowledge — turning it away from the study of ideas and ideologies, where Mannheim and Scheler had placed it, toward the knowledge of everyday life, the taken-for-granted common sense through which ordinary people build and inhabit a shared world. Its account of how a human world is produced, objectified, and passed on — the dialectic of externalisation, objectivation, and internalisation — is set out on the social construction of reality subject page, the tradition the book founded. The International Sociological Association later ranked it among the most influential sociology books of the twentieth century.

Berger’s own contribution rested on a humanistic reading of the discipline set out in his early Invitation to Sociology (1963): sociology as a form of consciousness that reveals the constructed character of the social world and, in doing so, opens a certain freedom — to see that “things are not what they seem,” and that an order taken as natural is in fact made and therefore alterable.

The sociology of religion

Berger was, for much of his career, primarily a sociologist of religion, and it is here that his work took its most public turn.

The Sacred Canopy (1967) applied the construction-of-reality framework to religion, treating religion as the most ambitious human attempt to build a sacred cosmos — a symbolic universe that locates the fragile human order within an ultimate, cosmic frame and so shields it against the terror of meaninglessness. In the same work he advanced a strong version of the secularisation thesis: that modernity, with its pluralism and its rationalised institutions, inevitably erodes the plausibility of religious belief, undermining the shared structures that keep a sacred canopy credible.

By the 1990s Berger had publicly repudiated that thesis. The world, he concluded, was not becoming less religious — much of it was becoming more so — and the secularisation theory he and others had held was, in his own words, essentially mistaken. He recast the real effect of modernity not as secularisation but as pluralisation: the multiplication of available worldviews, which throws belief into the mode of choice rather than destroying it. The reversal is unusually candid for a theorist repudiating his own signature idea, and it is central to any account of him.

His related books include A Rumor of Angels (1969), which sought “signals of transcendence” within ordinary experience, and later works on modernity, development, and the global varieties of religion.

Politics and stance

Berger described his own temperament as conservative in sympathy but committed above all to even-handed description over advocacy — wary of a sociology that dissolves into political programme. He engaged questions of modernisation and economic development (including a qualified defence of capitalism’s role in development) and directed research institutes concerned with the relation of culture, religion, and economic life. From the late 1970s into the 1980s he also worked as a consultant to the tobacco industry, contributing to its social-science defence against public-health critics of environmental tobacco smoke — an association documented in the industry papers and treated as a serious mark against him in later assessments of his career. Throughout, his methodological instinct was the one Invitation to Sociology announced: to hold the describer’s distance, and to treat the actor’s own understanding of their world as the thing to be understood rather than explained away.

Key works

See also: Luckmann · The Social Construction of Reality