Abstract
In his new intellectual autobiography, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World without Becoming a Bore, eminent sociologist Peter Berger recounts his sixty-plus years of contributions to the discipline of sociology. This engaging and readable account provides summary overviews of his numerous publications, including his successful 1963 book, Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, which has sold well over one million copies and has been translated into 21 different foreign languages (and, remarkably, was written in only three weeks). I have assigned Invitation to Sociology in my Sociology 101 course for more than fifteen years. An image presented in the book – that of the sociologist as spy – typically elicits fruitful analysis and discussion in the class.
Like a good spy, says Berger, the sociologist does not accept taken-for-granted explanations about the social world, but probes beneath the surface, looks through keyholes, and clandestinely reads other people’s mail in order to understand and objectively report on the actual workings of society. Early in Adventures one learns that this image has not always been for Berger strictly metaphorical; he tells of an occasion during graduate school days when he discovered, read, and then confiscated an intriguing romantic letter written by his then girlfriend’s roommate to her boyfriend. His only regret is that somehow along the way he lost this ‘priceless cultural document.’ This story, along with a number of other humorous anecdotes and witty quips, demonstrates Berger’s success in achieving the book’s subtitle.
There remains, however, a serious dimension to the spy metaphor. As Berger explains in Invitation, the sociologist-as-spy accurately reports what he discovers and endeavors to put aside institutional expectations and/or personal prejudices in this role. In Adventures, Berger articulates his allegiance to Weberian value-neutrality, adding that it is the only orthodoxy to which he continues to adhere. He also follows Weber in holding that while the social scientist is to be value-neutral in his or her role as a sociologist, this does not preclude him or her from participating in other roles. Berger, in fact, gives considerable attention to the challenge of finding the right balance ‘between being an objective observer and a morally engaged member of society,’ or what he calls the sociologist’s ‘dual citizenship.’ Accordingly, while the book is primarily about Berger’s life as a social scientist, the reader also learns a little about his political and theological trajectories – from liberal to ‘moderately conservative’ in the former and from neo-orthodox (he once aspired to be a Lutheran minister) to ‘quite liberal’ in the latter.
However, much is left out of these accounts. The clear focus is on Berger’s development as a sociologist, which started accidentally in 1949 at the New School for Social Research. While waiting to enter the seminary, Berger enrolled in a sociology class in order to learn more about American society (he had emigrated to the US from Austria as a teenager); he found the approach intoxicating and ultimately decided to pursue a doctoral degree in sociology at the New School. His views of the discipline were significantly influenced during this period by three teachers: Albert Salomon, Carl Mayer, and Alfred Schutz. Upon completing his doctoral work, Berger served two years in the army and then held positions at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina (two years) and Hartford Seminary (five years) before returning to New York in 1963 as a member of the Graduate Faculty at the New School, a position that resulted, in part, from the success of Invitation.
Berger recalls his time teaching at the New School as the halcyon years of his career. He was part of an exciting and intellectually stimulating community of scholars, which included, among others, his old mentor Carl Mayer, his wife Brigitte, Thomas Luckman (with whom he would write the influential book The Social Construction of Reality), and Hansfried Kellner (Brigitte’s brother and co-author with the Bergers of The Homeless Mind). The group was enormously productive and had great ambitions to establish an intellectual ‘empire’ and shape the direction of sociology. These ambitions crashed, however, when Berger was made chair of sociology at the New School in 1969 and unsuccessfully attempted to alter the direction of that department. As a consequence of this failed effort, he left the New School and began teaching at Rutgers University in 1970. Thereafter, he saw himself as something of an exile, both from the discipline of sociology and from the zeitgeist more generally.
Regardless of this self-perception, Berger remained a productive and influential scholar. He also benefited, during this ostensible exile, from fruitful intellectual collaborations with individuals both inside and outside of the academy, including Richard Neuhaus, with whom he started the monthly journal Worldview, and Ivan Illich, whose center in Cuernavaca, Mexico, provided the lively intellectual setting from which The Homeless Mind would come forth. After nine years at Rutgers, Berger moved to Boston College, where he taught for two years, before moving to Boston University, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. At Boston University he established an institute which would eventually be called the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs (CURA). As director of CURA, he served the role of a ‘conductor,’ providing opportunities for scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to work together on common intellectual projects. Thus, Berger may never have recaptured the community he once enjoyed at the New School, but he gave scores of scholars the space to participate in what he calls ‘the coffee house principle,’ that is: ‘If you collect the right people and have them sit together long enough, they are bound to come up with something interesting.’
Though Berger’s political, economic, and theological views may have changed over time, there is a clear continuity in his allegiance to core Weberian ideas, in particular Weber’s emphasis on ‘value-free’ scholarship. As noted above, this does not mean that the sociologist is precluded from participating in other roles, nor does it mean that the findings of the sociologist are of no use to those working in more explicitly normative disciplines and enterprises. To the contrary, sociology ‘is morally justified,’ says Berger, ‘by its contribution to a humane society.’ To illustrate the essence of sociology’s contribution in this regard, Berger revisits in Adventures another image first introduced in Invitation, that of the puppet or marionette. Humans are like puppets, and the sociologist’s role is to look up, understand, and measure the strength, force, and direction of the strings that animate and direct human action. While marionettes may be determined by these strings without choice, discovery of the strings by humans ‘is a first step toward freedom.’
In addition to contributing to human freedom in this way, sociological research cultivates other virtues, including fostering an ability to listen carefully to others, regardless of their place or status in society (that is, the ‘unrespectability motif’). In Adventures, Berger recounts another accident of sorts when he was given a unique opportunity to develop this particular skill. Upon completing his graduate studies at the New School, he was drafted into the US army, where he served from 1953 to 1955. While stationed at Fort Benning in Georgia, he was mistakenly classified as a social worker and eventually assigned the role of military psychotherapist – a wonderfully ironic assignment for an sociologist who would later write the insightful and prescient essay ‘Toward a Sociological Understanding of Psychoanalysis’ (which debunks psychoanalysis as ‘an unsuccessful attempt to respond to modern society’) and who would forcefully argue in Invitation that social work is one of the enterprises that sociology clearly is not. Nevertheless, as a ‘fake psychotherapist,’ Berger benefited from his long conversations with patients, who came from a variety of backgrounds across the United States, and was fascinated by and ‘really listened’ to their stories.
Careful listening is directly related to another virtue fostered by the sociological perspective, namely humility and the willingness to change one’s views when the evidence demands it. I point out to my Sociology 101 students that Berger himself demonstrates this quality in his retraction of his earlier position on the secularization thesis, a position given fullest articulation in his 1967 book, The Sacred Canopy. In Adventures, Berger provides an interesting account of this revised position. As a consequence of his encounters with active and widespread religiosity in a number of places around the world – particularly in Africa, Latin America, and Asia – he backed off his original secularization argument. Where he earlier concluded that the rationalizing processes of modernization led to the disenchantment of the world and the full secularization of society, he now believes it is more accurate to say that modernization leads not to secularization but to pluralization. Modernity, then, is characterized not by the absence of religion but by a plurality of religions; it leads not to atheism but to a kind of polytheism. In the modern context, people have more choices, and in most cases, says Berger, they choose religion.
He came to this position, as he did on a number of other social issues, through a methodological approach he refers to as ‘sociological tourism.’ According to Berger, ‘sociological tourism’ is ‘going to a place after one has read about it, planning one’s stay so as to meet as many well-informed people as possible, and then just letting its reality seep into one’s consciousness.’ He marvels at all that one can learn from even short visits to various social worlds. His account of sociological tourism calls to mind – and stands as something of a contrast to – two other recent descriptions of empirical investigation. In his book, The Cosmopolitan Canopy, sociologist Elijah Anderson (2011) makes reference to what he calls ‘folk ethnography,’ the gathering of information by ordinary folks living in a particular social milieu. Here too, the ‘data’ gathered either support or transform the observers’ perspectives and outlooks. Alternatively, in his book on comparative criminal justice, legal scholar David Nelken (2010) endorses a Geertzian style of ‘living there,’ an approach to comparative research in which the researcher lives in a foreign country for an extended period in order to achieve an in-depth knowledge of a local legal culture.
Berger’s ‘sociological tourism’ is more focused, systematic, and intentional than Anderson’s ‘folk ethnography’ but less extensive, thick, and locally textured than Nelken’s ‘living there.’ Berger’s wide-ranging forays into various parts of the planet (he writes of crisscrossing the globe with ‘maniacal frequency’) has given him a helpful comparative perspective on a variety of changes in the modern world and has provided him with helpful insights into the processes of globalization, capitalism, and economic development – all central areas of concern to Berger during his years directing CURA. It’s unlikely that more focused and locally concentrated research projects would have yielded the sort of substantive contributions he has made in these areas. That said, one cannot help but wonder whether the excursions of the tourist are always enough to capture the full and nuanced complexities of a given social world and whether something that comes closer to Nelken’s ‘living there’ may be warranted in some instances.
I have assigned Invitation over the years because it captures the heart and passion of the sociological imagination. Adventures, likewise, from the first to the last page, illustrates the sense of discovery and excitement that is central to sociological inquiry. At the start of the book, Berger writes that sociology ‘is well suited for someone who has an abiding fascination with the vast panorama of the human world, someone who has a passion for discovering what is really going on.’ He ends the book on a similar note, observing that though the profession of sociology has moved in directions uncongenial to him, he has never given up on the vision of the discipline he first encountered at the New School. For Berger, sociology, at its best, is still characterized by an ‘endless fascination with the vagaries of the human world and with the efforts to understand them.’ While Invitation bids the curious to consider what is unique about the discipline of sociology, Adventures provides a fascinating picture of the man who extends the invitation, a man who, in Weber’s words, has never lost the ‘passionate devotion,’ the ‘strange intoxication’ that is endemic to ‘the inward calling’ of the sociologist.