Peter Berger's central claim is a paradox held together by a dialectic. Society is a human product, entirely made by people; and society is an objective reality that confronts its makers as a fact beyond their control; and people are in turn the products of the society they have made. Everything in his sociology of knowledge follows from refusing to collapse either half of that statement into the other.
The book that stated it, The Social Construction of Reality (1966), written with Thomas Luckmann, took Alfred Schutz's phenomenology of everyday life and joined it to Durkheim's account of society as objective fact, Weber's account of subjective meaning and Mead's account of the socialised self. The result was a general theory of how institutions come into being and how the knowledge that sustains them is transmitted, made plausible and defended — a theory Berger then turned on religion in The Sacred Canopy (1967), where the sacred appears as the most ambitious of all human attempts at world-maintenance.
Life and intellectual formation
Berger was born in Vienna in 1929 into a family of Jewish origin that had converted to Christianity, and emigrated to the United States shortly after the Second World War. He took his degree at Wagner College and his doctorate at the New School for Social Research in New York, where the exiled European faculty included Alfred Schutz, whose phenomenology of the life-world became the foundation of his own work and whose students also included Thomas Luckmann, his lifelong collaborator.
Berger taught at Hartford Theological Seminary, then at Rutgers, the New School, Boston College and finally Boston University, where he founded and long directed a research institute on culture, religion and world affairs. He was a practising Lutheran who insisted, on principle, that his theology and his sociology be kept methodologically apart — religion could be explained sociologically without that explanation deciding its truth. He wrote copiously and unusually well: a novel, a memoir, essays on development and capitalism, and a body of work on modernity that included The Homeless Mind (1973), written with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, and Pyramids of Sacrifice (1974), a sceptical account of development ideologies.
Invitation to Sociology
Invitation to Sociology (1963) remains the best short statement of what a sociological outlook does to a person who acquires it. Berger described sociology as a form of consciousness organised by several motifs. The debunking motif looks past official explanations to unintended functions and hidden arrangements. The motif of unrespectability insists that the sociologist must be as interested in the brothel and the prison as in the church and the parliament. The relativising motif dissolves the appearance of natural necessity in identities and institutions. The cosmopolitan motif makes the sociologist at home in the whole variety of human worlds.
The book's argument on freedom is the germ of his later work. Society is in us as much as around us: it is not merely an external constraint but the source of our identities, desires and self-understandings, so that most conformity requires no coercion. Freedom, where it exists, comes from seeing the construction for what it is — a stance Berger developed through Sartre's bad faith and through the idea of role distance, and which he summarised in the image of society as an unfinished drama in which the actors improvise their parts.
The social construction of reality
The theory proper turns on three moments of a continuous dialectic. Externalisation is the outpouring of human activity into the world, made necessary by the biological under-determination of human beings, who must build the stable environment that instinct does not supply. Objectivation is the process by which the products of that activity attain a facticity confronting their producers as something outside and other than themselves. Internalisation is the reabsorption of that objectivated world into consciousness through socialisation, so that the structures of the outer world become the structures of subjective awareness.
The mechanism of institution-building is set out with unusual clarity. Habitualisation comes first: any action repeated frequently becomes a pattern that can be reproduced with economy of effort, which narrows choice and frees attention. Institutionalisation occurs whenever there is a reciprocal typification of habitualised actions by types of actors — that is, when the pattern is not merely mine but is expected of anyone of my kind. Institutions so formed have a history, control conduct, and appear to later generations as given.
That last point is the crux of the intergenerational argument. For the first generation an institution is remembered as something they made; for their children it is a world already there, transmitted as objective fact, and it becomes fully objective only when it is passed on to people who had no hand in making it. Reification is the extreme case: the apprehension of human products as though they were facts of nature or divine decree, so that the maker forgets authorship.
The world thus objectivated must be explained and justified, and legitimation is the name for that work. Berger and Luckmann distinguished four ascending levels: incipient legitimation carried in the vocabulary itself; rudimentary theoretical propositions in the form of proverbs, maxims and folk tales; explicit theories administered by specialised personnel; and symbolic universes — bodies of theoretical tradition, such as mythology, theology, philosophy and science, which integrate all the separate provinces of meaning and locate the individual's life and death within a totality. Symbolic universes require maintenance against rivals and deviants, and Berger and Luckmann described two machineries for it: therapy, which brings the deviant back inside the accepted definitions, and nihilation, which conceptually liquidates the rival by explaining it in the terms of one's own universe. Socialisation carries all this into persons, primary socialisation through significant others whose world the child cannot choose, and secondary socialisation into institutional sub-worlds. Any subjective reality requires a plausibility structure — a supporting social base of conversation and relationships — and it withers when that base is withdrawn.
Religion, the sacred canopy and secularisation
The Sacred Canopy applies the framework to religion, defined as the human enterprise by which a sacred cosmos is established. Human beings cannot tolerate meaninglessness; the socially constructed order, or nomos, is fragile and perpetually threatened by anomy, which breaks through at death, suffering and injustice. Religion performs cosmisation: it projects the humanly built order onto the universe itself, so that the fragile arrangement of a particular society appears as part of the nature of things. It is therefore the most effective instrument of world-maintenance ever devised, and its characteristic products include theodicies, the explanations that make suffering and inequality bearable by locating them in a larger order. Berger did not shrink from the implication, which he treated in Marxist terms as alienation and false consciousness, that religion legitimises both the cosmos and the local distribution of power.
The book's second half addressed modernity. Berger argued that secularisation — the withdrawal of sectors of society and culture from the domination of religious institutions and symbols — was the outcome of industrialisation, urbanisation and above all pluralism. Where a single religious monopoly once held an unchallenged plausibility structure, pluralism puts competing worldviews side by side, converts religion into a matter of individual choice, and pushes religious institutions into a market situation in which they must adapt their product to consumer preference. In The Heretical Imperative (1979) he pressed the point further: modernity turns what was once fate into choice, and since heresy originally meant choosing, every modern believer is compelled to be a heretic.
The revision: desecularisation and pluralism
Berger later did what few theorists do and repudiated his own thesis in public. By the 1990s the evidence — Islamic resurgence, Pentecostal expansion across Latin America, Africa and Asia, Hindu nationalism in India, evangelical strength in the United States — had convinced him that modernisation did not reliably produce the decline of religion. He edited The Desecularization of the World (1999) around the claim that the modern world is as furiously religious as ever, and observed that the genuine exceptions were two: Western Europe, and an internationally networked secular intelligentsia with disproportionate influence over education, law and media.
His final position, set out in The Many Altars of Modernity (2014), retained one half of the original argument and dropped the other. Pluralism, not secularisation, is the master concept: modernity does not empty the world of gods but multiplies them, obliges religion to survive by choice rather than by inheritance, and produces a condition in which secular and religious discourses coexist within the same society and often within the same person, each used in its own sphere.
Criticisms
Marxist and structural critics argue that the constructionist dialectic is idealist in effect if not in intention: reality is constructed, but by whom, and with what resources? The Social Construction of Reality has little to say about class, capital, colonialism or the state, and legitimation is analysed as a cognitive process rather than as an exercise of power — an omission later theorists of ideology and discourse set out to repair. Berger's own political trajectory sharpened the charge, since his defence of capitalism and his criticism of development orthodoxy placed him on the conservative side of the argument he had helped others to make.
Others question the theoretical synthesis. Yoking Durkheim's objectivism to Schutz's phenomenology may equivocate rather than reconcile, and the book's sweeping generality makes it difficult to falsify. The relativism objection is persistent: if all realities are constructed, the sociologist's own account enjoys no privilege. And in the sociology of religion, secularisation theorists such as Steve Bruce reply that Berger's recantation confuses the vitality of religion in societies that were never highly secularised with a reversal in those that were, that his own account of pluralism predicts precisely the decline of religious authority he later denied, and that the European exception is too large to be treated as an exception at all.
Legacy
The phrase social construction has escaped its authors and become common property across the social sciences and beyond, which is both a measure of the book's reach and a source of the loose usage Berger himself deplored. Within sociology his influence runs through the sociology of knowledge, the study of socialisation and identity, organisational and institutional theory, and above all the sociology of religion, where the secularisation debate he opened, entered on both sides, and partly closed remains the field's organising controversy. Invitation to Sociology continues to serve as the discipline's most persuasive recruiting document.
For the UPSC answer
Berger is doubly useful and should be deployed in two different papers. In methodology answers, present The Social Construction of Reality as the phenomenological alternative to positivism, and reproduce the machinery exactly — externalisation, objectivation, internalisation, then habitualisation to institutionalisation to legitimation and symbolic universes — since precision here distinguishes a strong script. In religion answers, define secularisation in his own terms as the withdrawal of sectors of society and culture from religious domination, and make the pluralism argument the mechanism. The examiner-pleasing move is his own reversal: state the original thesis, then his desecularisation position, then the mature view that modernity pluralises rather than secularises, and illustrate it with the resurgence of religion in India and beyond. Close with the two standard criticisms, the neglect of power in construction and Bruce's defence of secularisation, so that the answer weighs the debate rather than narrating it.
References & further reading
- Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.
- Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. New York: Doubleday.
- Berger, P. L. (1967). The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Doubleday.
- Berger, P. L. (1979). The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation. New York: Anchor Press.
- Berger, P. L. (ed.) (1999). The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
- Berger, P. L. (2014). The Many Altars of Modernity: Toward a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age. Boston: De Gruyter.