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The Social Construction of Reality

The social construction of reality is the position that the everyday world people treat as simply given — its institutions, roles, categories, and the facts that hold within them — is a human product, brought into being through shared activity and held in place by continued practice, rather than a natural order the social world merely reflects. The phrase is the title of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), the work that gave the idea its name and its most developed statement, and it now labels a wider family of positions in sociology and philosophy about how a shared world becomes objective for those who live in it.

The claim is easily overstated and easily dismissed on the overstatement. It is not that individuals invent the world at will, nor that anything can be made real by wishing it so. The constructed world confronts each person as a massive, resistant fact they did not choose and cannot simply revise — that resistance is central to the account, not an embarrassment to it. What is claimed is that this facticity is produced and sustained socially: real, objective, and constraining for those inside it, while depending for its existence on the ongoing activity that keeps it in being.

Berger and Luckmann’s dialectic

The core of the 1966 book is a three-moment account of how a shared world is produced and passed on. The moments are simultaneous and continuous, not stages in a sequence — society is described as a dialectic running all three at once.

Externalisation. Human activity pours out into the world — habits, ways of doing things, arrangements between people. Because human beings are, on the authors’ reading (following Gehlen), biologically underdetermined — not fitted by instinct to a fixed environment — they must build a stable world for themselves, and they do so through activity that lays down regularities.

Objectivation. Those regularities congeal into a facticity that confronts their makers as something outside them. Repeated action becomes habitualisation; shared, reciprocal habitualisation becomes institutionalisation; and an institution, once established, stands over against the individual as an external, objective given — experienced as having a reality of its own, though it is a human product. Language is the primary vehicle: it objectivates shared experience and makes it available as a stock of knowledge.

Internalisation. The next generation takes the objectivated world back in through socialisation, and comes to inhabit it as simply the way things are. Primary socialisation — childhood induction into the world, emotionally charged and not experienced as one option among others — installs the first and deepest layer; secondary socialisation adds the role-specific knowledge of particular institutional sub-worlds. What was made by human activity is received by those who inherit it as objective reality, and the loop closes.

The book’s summary formula compresses the dialectic: society is a human product; society is an objective reality; man is a social product. Each moment is true at once, and holding all three together — without collapsing into either the claim that society is merely subjective or the claim that it is simply given — is the account’s distinctive move.

Around this core sit the book’s other central terms. The paramount reality of everyday life is the intersubjective world taken for granted in the natural attitude, against which other “finite provinces of meaning” (dreams, theory, play) are set off. Symbolic universes are the overarching frames — religion, myth, philosophy, science — that legitimate the institutional order and locate it within a total scheme of meaning; when a symbolic universe is challenged, legitimation and its machineries work to maintain it. Plausibility structures are the social bases — the communities and conversations — that keep a given world credible to those who hold it; a reality persists only as long as its plausibility structure does.

Berger and Luckmann also redefined the sociology of knowledge itself. Where Mannheim and Scheler had trained it on ideas, ideologies, and theoretical thought, Berger and Luckmann turned it toward the knowledge of everyday life — “the sum total of what everybody knows” about the social world, the common-sense stock of typifications and recipes through which ordinary reality is handled. The theoretical constructions of intellectuals became, on this view, a thin and specialised layer atop the vast body of taken-for-granted knowledge that actually holds a society together.

Lineage

The account is a synthesis, and its architects were explicit about the debts.

Alfred Schutz is the most direct. Berger and Luckmann both studied under him at the New School, and the book’s phenomenological foundation — the lifeworld, the natural attitude, typifications, the stock of knowledge at hand, the structure of the everyday world as intersubjectively given — is Schutz’s, applied to the sociology of knowledge. Schutz in turn had married Husserl’s phenomenology of the lifeworld to Weber’s interpretive sociology of meaningful action.

Émile Durkheim supplies the objectivity side: social facts as “exterior and constraining,” collective representations, the reality of society sui generis. George Herbert Mead and symbolic interactionism supply the internalisation side: the self arising through social interaction, the “generalised other” taken inward. The book is in part an attempt to hold Durkheim’s “society as objective reality” and Weber’s and Mead’s “society as subjective meaning” together in a single frame — which is what the externalisation/internalisation dialectic is built to do.

Behind these stand Karl Marx (social being conditioning consciousness; the world as human activity objectified), Hegel (objective spirit — Geist externalised in institutions, law, and custom — the deep proto-source of the whole externalisation figure), and the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen (the world-openness of the biologically underdetermined human) and Helmuth Plessner.

The wider family

“Social construction” spread well beyond the 1966 book, and the positions travelling under the name are not all the same.

John Searle, in The Construction of Social Reality (1995), gave the most precise philosophical account of one part of the territory: how there can be objective facts that exist only by human agreement. His apparatus is the status function — the assignment of a function to something that it does not perform by its physical nature but only because it is collectively accepted as having it — captured in the formula “X counts as Y in context C.” A piece of paper counts as money, a person counts as president, a line counts as a boundary. These institutional facts rest on collective intentionality and constitutive rules, and are distinguished from brute facts (a mountain’s height) that hold independently of any agreement. Searle’s account is notable for combining social construction about institutions with a firm realism about the brute physical world — he is not a global constructionist, and read himself as opposing the relativist uses of the phrase.

Neighbouring this are Margaret Gilbert’s plural subjects and joint commitment, Raimo Tuomela’s we-mode intentionality, and, in economics and law, the treatment of institutions as settled, self-reproducing practice: money as pure collective acceptance, H. L. A. Hart’s rule of recognition (law existing because officials continue to treat certain rules as authoritative), Elinor Ostrom’s commons rule-systems. Maurice Halbwachs’s collective memory treats even the shared past as an inherited construction; Cornelius Castoriadis’s social imaginary casts society as self-instituting; Mary Douglas’s How Institutions Think and the institutional economics of Veblen, Commons, and North all read institutions as objectivated habits of thought.

A separate and much-contested extension runs through the sociology of scientific knowledge and science studies, where “social construction” was applied to scientific facts themselves — the claim that what counts as scientific knowledge is shaped by social processes, not dictated by nature alone. This is where the phrase became a flashpoint (see below), and where its defenders and critics most often talk past each other over what “constructed” is being claimed.

Convergence, objectivity, and the philosophical neighbours

The book’s central puzzle — how something made by us can nonetheless be genuinely objective — is one that several philosophical traditions approach from their own directions, and the subject sits in conversation with them.

The pragmatist line treats objectivity as constituted by convergence: Peirce’s real as the opinion fated to be agreed by the community of inquiry in the limit, and Putnam’s internal realism, on which truth is idealised rational acceptability rather than correspondence to a mind-independent order. Habermas’s discourse theory grounds validity in the conditions of communication oriented toward agreement — though its idealised consensus is itself a contested stopping point. Wittgenstein’s later work runs alongside all of these: forms of life, agreement in judgments as the bedrock of shared practice, and the inherited world-picture of On Certainty that one is socialised into rather than argued into.

The critical-realist tradition of Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer offers a pointed alternative from within social theory: a stratified social ontology on which social structure is real and causally efficacious yet dependent on the activity it governs — Archer’s morphogenetic cycle (structure inherited, conditioning agency, reproduced or transformed by it) is a direct rival account of the same dialectic Berger and Luckmann describe, and one that insists construction does not exhaust reality.

Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (1999) is the standing critical clarification: much construction-talk, he argued, is confused about what is claimed to be constructed — the idea, the object, or the experience — and about how radical the claim is meant to be. His notion of looping kinds — classifications of people that change the people classified, who then react back on the classification (“making up people”) — marks the place where social construction is least disputable and most illuminating, and is itself a contribution to the subject as much as a critique of it.

Non-Western thought carries cognate positions without the individualist starting point the Western debate assumes: Ubuntu, on which the shared relational order is the condition of personhood rather than a construction laid over pre-social individuals, and the Confucian account of ritual (li) as the cultivated form through which a shared human world is sustained.

Disputes and contested reception

The subject is defined as much by the arguments over it as by its statements.

The realism question. The sharpest and most persistent dispute is over how far the claim reaches. That institutions are socially constructed is close to uncontested; that scientific facts, or the natural world itself, are socially constructed is fiercely contested, and the “science wars” of the 1990s were fought largely over this. Critics — including Hacking, and forcefully the physicist Alan Sokal — charged that strong constructionist claims about scientific knowledge either trade on an equivocation (the process of inquiry is social; the findings need not be merely social) or collapse into an untenable relativism. Defenders reply that the target was always the social shaping of what gets accepted as knowledge, not the denial of a mind-independent world. Berger and Luckmann themselves stayed with the everyday and social world and did not make the strong claim about natural science; much of the controversy attaches to later, more radical extensions of the phrase.

The relativism charge. If reality is constructed, does anything go? The standard construction­ist reply distinguishes constructed from arbitrary: a construction is a collective achievement with its own stubborn facticity, binding on those within it and revisable only through social process, not a free choice open to the individual. Whether that reply fully escapes relativism, or only relocates it, is a live argument — and one the subject shares with pluralism and the constructivist epistemologies it borders.

The agency and structure problem. Berger and Luckmann were criticised, from within sociology, for an account in which the objectivated world can seem to overwhelm the agency that produced it — internalisation running so deep that the scope for individuals to remake their world drops out of view. The critical-realist and later practice-theoretic accounts (Bourdieu’s habitus, Giddens’s structuration) can be read as attempts to restore the balance the dialectic was meant to hold.

Over-extension. As the phrase spread, “socially constructed” was applied to almost everything, often as a gesture rather than an analysis. Hacking’s book is in part a plea to say what is being claimed and how strongly; the looseness of the popular usage is a real feature of the subject’s reception, not merely a misunderstanding of it.

Key works and further reading

See also: Berger · Luckmann · Searle · Constructivism · Phenomenology · Pragmatism · Pluralism