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Thomas Luckmann (1927–2016)

Thomas Luckmann was a Slovene-Austrian sociologist, co-author with Peter Berger of The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and, in his own right, the figure who carried Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology of the lifeworld forward into a systematic sociology of knowledge, language, communication, and religion. Where the joint book made his name, his solo work gave the tradition its most rigorous phenomenological grounding — completing Schutz’s unfinished project and extending it toward how meaning is built and communicated in everyday life.

Thomas Luckmann (14 October 1927 – 10 May 2016) was born in Jesenice, in what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and is now Slovenia, into an Austro-Slovene family. After the war he studied at the University of Innsbruck and Vienna and then at the New School for Social Research in New York, where, like Berger, he studied under Alfred Schutz. He taught in the United States and Germany, holding a long chair at the University of Konstanz, where much of his mature work was done.

The social construction of reality

The 1966 treatise with Berger is Luckmann’s most widely known work. It redefined the sociology of knowledge as the study of everyday, taken-for-granted knowledge and set out the dialectic — externalisation, objectivation, internalisation — by which a shared world is produced and inherited; that account is developed on the social construction of reality subject page. Luckmann brought to the collaboration the deeper phenomenological training: the book’s foundation in Schutz’s lifeworld, the natural attitude, and the structures of everyday experience is the part of the synthesis most closely his.

Completing Schutz, and the phenomenology of the lifeworld

Luckmann’s most consequential scholarly labour was the completion of the unfinished work of his teacher. Alfred Schutz died in 1959 leaving the project of a systematic account of the lifeworld incomplete; drawing on Schutz’s notes and manuscripts, Luckmann finished and published The Structures of the Life-World in two volumes (the first appearing in English in 1973 and in German in 1975, the second in 1984), the fullest statement of the phenomenological sociology Schutz had begun. Through this work Luckmann became the principal conduit by which Husserlian phenomenology, filtered through Schutz, entered sociology as a working method rather than a philosophical background — the analysis of the everyday world as it is given to consciousness, its layers of typification, its stock of knowledge at hand, its zones of relevance.

Religion, language, and communication

Luckmann’s independent research extended the phenomenological programme into several domains.

The Invisible Religion (1967) argued that religion had not disappeared under modernity but changed form: as the churches lost their monopoly, religion became privatised and diffuse, no longer housed in a single institution but assembled by individuals from a scattered market of meanings. This “invisible religion” — the individual’s own ultimate framework of significance — is a form religion takes under modernity rather than a symptom of its decline, and the thesis is an influential counter to simple secularisation stories.

His later work turned increasingly to language and communication as the concrete media through which social reality is built and maintained. He developed a sociology of communicative genres — the patterned, recurrent forms (the greeting, the proverb, the confession, the moral tale) through which a community stabilises and transmits its stock of knowledge — locating in the fine structure of everyday communication the mechanisms the 1966 book had described at the level of theory. Across this work runs a consistent concern: how the shared world is not only constructed once but continuously reproduced, moment by moment, in the ordinary business of people making themselves understood to one another.

Key works

See also: Berger · The Social Construction of Reality · Phenomenology · Husserl