Social Construction as Fantasy: Reconsidering Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality after 50 Years

A contrarian premise: prior to 1966, most sociology of knowledge was a sharp knife that cut through socio-economic ideologies propagated mainly by business and government entities. It had retained the macro-dimension bequeathed by its founders in the 18th and 19th centuries, later culminating in certain works by Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, Georges Gurvitch, and others. This heritage of critical attacks upon ideologically sponsored distortions of social life has often been recounted (e.g. by Lichtheim, 1965). The goal of all such work, from Voltaire and Destutt de Tracy onward, has been to bring powermongers to heel in the interest of political and socio-economic truth. Yet after Berger and Luckmann’s book appeared, the knife was dulled, as the sociology of knowledge steadily shrank into a small-bore branch of social psychology, with comforting emphasis upon micro-interactions in the ‘everyday’ world. As such it unintentionally aided the apotheosis of The Self that has become a ubiquitous concern in the more prosperous societies. This marked change from the macro-political to the micro-psychological transpired within the extra-curricular context of conservatives repudiating ‘The Sixties,’ perhaps serendipitously. But whatever the motives or sources of origin, the diluting impact of this ‘new’ worldview took the political-economic fire out of Wissenssoziologie, leaving in its place a cheerful playground of the merely ‘socially constructed.’

That this viewpoint is not received wisdom concerning The Social Construction of Reality (SCR), a book prized by legions of readers, goes without saying, and reminds one of Benjamin Franklin and his younger admirer, Tom Paine. The wise older American, so we are told, wrote a letter to Paine after reading the manuscript of a work in progress called The Age of Reason which Paine had sent to him for evaluation. The letter was perhaps sent in 1786 and might not have been written by Franklin, but is still quoted as if it were. This alleged letter of Franklin’s is as easy to find online as it is difficult to date precisely or to authenticate, because every minister searching for a Founding Father’s legitimation of his or her trade knows it, and borrows from it during one sermon or another. In his biography of Franklin, Walter Isaacson committed over 700 words in small font, probing the question of the letter’s date and authenticity (Isaacson, 2003: 562–563, note 47). His painstaking effort reveals, against the Yale editors of the complete Franklin edition, that it was indeed written in 1786 and by Franklin. In 1938 Carl Van Doren’s biography of Franklin won the Pulitzer, but he did not mention the famous letter to Paine. One wonders if Isaacson’s careful sleuthing 65 years later was an advance in scholarship. Perhaps it is a symptom of our own age of unreason, or, as Peter Berger might call it, following Nietzsche, our ‘age of mistrust’ (Berger, 2011: 94; see also Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 7) or ‘school of suspicion’ (Jaspers, 1965: 211): ‘People whom we cannot tolerate we try to make suspect’ (Nietzsche, 1984: 243, Aphorism 557).

Here, in part, is what Franklin probably wrote to his friend and admirer, Tom Paine:

Though your reasonings are subtile [sic] and may prevail with some readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general sentiments of mankind on that subject [religious belief], and the consequences of printing this piece will be, a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself, mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face . . . I would advise, you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before it is seen by any other persons; whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification by the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it? (emphases added)

Paine accepted Franklin’s shrewd opinion and postponed publishing The Age of Reason until 1794 – four years after Franklin’s death.

Despite Franklin’s wise counsel, I feel the strongest urge to spit – directly into the Bergerian Gale, the Luckmannian Cyclone – the almost universal acclaim that SCR has won for itself in English, plus its 18 translations. How many serious books’ titles become a slogan within a few years of being published, even if often in corrupted form? How many remain in print 50 years after publication, ‘still selling well’ according to Berger’s autobiography (Berger, 2011: 89) as well as Luckmann’s 2014 filmed interview (Luckmann, 2014). The Social Construction of Reality has long since transcended the ontological status of mere monograph, ‘morphing’ into an astonishing phenomenon of global reach and persuasiveness. Its title is as famous as are The Lonely Crowd, Middletown, The Power Elite, Organization Man, and others from those golden days of sociology’s more robust past. And like Habits of the Heart or The Declining Significance of Race, it has benefited from the fact that everybody knows the title while very few interested parties, judging from typical references to the work in articles and monographs, any longer read the book with the care it received earlier in its existence.

The Social Construction of Reality is routinely identified as ‘foundational,’ ‘a classic,’ ‘a landmark,’ or ‘seminal,’ but, as is the case with so many ‘classics,’ evidence that it is still carefully studied, even in monographs exclusively dedicated to ‘social constructionism,’ does not readily present itself (cf. Elder-Vass, 2012: 207, 236–238; Hacking, 1999: 24–26, 97; Harris, 2010: 1, 3, 7, 12–14, 19, 91; Lock and Strong, 2010: 29, 327, 343; Weinberg, 2014: 2, 3, 8, 20, 51, 145). Relatedly, even in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, ‘Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction,’ Berger and Luckmann’s book is not listed in a long bibliography (Mallon, 2013). Neither is it mentioned in a survey article on ‘The New Sociology of Knowledge’ (Swidler and Arditi, 1994). This inattention to the book’s finer points is due in part to its intrinsic theoretical difficulty, especially in the opening chapters where the sociology of knowledge and Schutz’s phenomenology are breathlessly surveyed. Yet, more importantly, if ‘everybody knows’ the main argument, why bother reading the mere details? After all, there are tweets to attend to.

It is also likely the case that a book larded with dozens of foreign terms and idioms – a sign of the authors’ European sensibilities – today seems ‘off-putting’ if not downright ‘elitist.’ Neither Berger nor Luckmann were afraid to use such rhetorical devices freely 50 years ago. In addition to common foreign phrases like tout court, ex post facto, sui generis, or mutatis mutandis, others they routinely used include ab initio, opus alienum, opus proprium, in status nascendi, in nucleo, homo socius, a fortiori, sine ira et studio, sub specie universi, in nuce, in actu, ‘Hic Rhodus, hic salta,’ ex nihilo, realissimum, panta rhei, de novo, and exemplum horribile. Editors today, even at the most august scholarly publishing houses, would automatically remove such ‘reader unfriendly’ encumbrances, most especially from any manuscript for which they anticipated ‘textbook adoptions.’ In this way and many others, SCR is the work of another age, when young scholars could ‘strut their stuff’ with abandon, even in a work destined to sell many thousands of copies, much to their surprise.

Lately it has occurred to some scholars that they might ‘recover’ Das Kapital, and when they open its volumes they find a great deal that illuminates today’s sad global economic environment. Yet what they discover there bears only a slight relation to the more philosophical, existentialist Marx which many take to be Marxism in toto. Similarly, I would argue, should the vast army of social constructionists return to SCR, the motherlode, and read it carefully, they will find that it does not support their scattered arguments – unless viewed through the distorting lens of poor hermeneutic practice. This is why Berger, speaking for himself and Luckmann while imitating Marx, ‘have felt constrained to say repeatedly, “We are not constructivists”’ (Berger, 2011: 95). Luckmann recently spent more than a few minutes of his 19-minute video interview giving his many reasons why ‘constructivists’ do not understand SCR the way he and Berger intended it to be read, and harshly criticizes those who adopted ‘social constructionism’ as their slogan while failing to understand what the two young scholars had written. ‘We were both very much annoyed’ at this unpredicted development, said Luckmann; ‘we never thought of ourselves as such . . . I consider this [misappropriation of their ideas] as total nonsense’ (Luckmann, 2014).

Of course part of this misattribution is the two authors’ own fault due to a miscalculation that came back to haunt them. As Berger himself admitted in 2009,

Perhaps the word ‘construction’ . . . was unfortunate, as it suggests a creation ex nihilo—as if one said, ‘There is nothing but our constructions.’ But this was not the authors’ intention . . . What they proposed was that all reality was subject to socially derived interpretations. (Berger and Zijderveld, 2009: 66)

Had they more accurately titled the book The Social Interpretation of Reality, there would almost surely not be celebrations of its 50th birthday, despite its intrinsic value otherwise. But these two brash young men had a plan, hatched in 1962 when Berger was 33 and Luckmann 35. They ‘met once a week’ recalls Luckmann, and composed their manifesto in January 1963, just after Berger had finished five years working at The Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut before becoming a faculty member at the New School, his alma mater (Berger, 2011: 80). With a tight cabal of like-minded relatives and colleagues in New York City (which Berger called a ‘clique’), they planned to redirect sociology so that their sense of it – based primarily on the vast unpublished work of Alfred Schutz, of course, in addition to selected ideas of Mead, Weber, and Durkheim, seasoned with a pinch of Marx – could get them jobs and win for them the esteem they believed could be and likely should be theirs.

In 1992 when recalling SCR’s publication 25 years later, Berger remarked:

When Thomas Luckmann and I decided to write this book, in the early 1960s, our intentions were quite modest . . . One of Schutz’s unrealized projects had been to formulate a new theoretical foundation for the sociology of knowledge in terms of his blend of phenomenology and Weberian theory. We intended to realize this project. It was only in the course of working on the book that we discovered, to our own surprise, that the project developed a more ambitious scope. (Pfadenhauer, 2013: 11)

But 19 years later in his autobiography, he retracted these ‘modest intentions,’ and admitted having been coy when asked about the two authors’ ambitions: ‘I did not own up to our imperial fantasies’ (Berger, 2011: 92). He bluntly explains how their youthful hopes took shape:

As the sociology of knowledge project morphed into a much more ambitious theoretical enterprise, and as the fantasies of our little clique took on imperial scope, the book that was to be the end product of the project became a kind of manifesto . . . The subtitle, A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, nicely reflected an ambivalence in the minds of Thomas Luckmann and myself. Describing the topic simply in terms of the sociology of knowledge was an understatement—the book had turned into something much more ambitious. Yet the word treatise is pretentious, worthy of cofounders of an imperial undertaking. Well, the empire never happened. (Berger, 2011: 88, original emphasis).

Put simply, Berger, Luckmann, and their Central European confederates felt excluded from American sociology, knew they had a theoretical perspective more sophisticated than much of what passed for theory in the US at that time, and wanted to be ‘invited’ to the expanding party. They did not want forever to personify Simmel’s ‘marginal man.’ Once again, Berger explains their motivation clearly, this time in relation to a book he wrote in three weeks during the same time he and Luckmann were meeting weekly to write SCR:

I wanted out of Hartford, not because I was unhappy there but because (perhaps misguidedly) I wanted to be in a proper Sociology Department, with graduate students in sociology. Thus Invitation to Sociology had a subtext: a plea to fellow sociologists: Please invite me! (Berger, 2011: 76)

They no longer wished to be on the outside looking in upon the thriving sociological drama, when, it should be remembered, sociology was fast becoming the most popular undergraduate major in the United States.

Berger and Luckmann expressed phenomenal youthful chutzpah (Berger’s own word) by planning a series of articles and books that would transform sociology, snatching it away from the Parsons/Merton clan of structural-functionalists, by friendly implication allying itself with the symbolic interactionists whose homes were at Chicago, Iowa, and Berkeley, and incidentally slaying the quantitative dragon that lurked at Wisconsin, Ohio State, and other large, galumphing sites of quantophrenia, to use Pitirim Sorokin’s term of abuse (Sorokin, cited in Paquet, 2009). And to do that, they needed a catchy title, so they found one. As they have both said many times since, the book caught on and helped shape the prevailing zeitgeist, while also reflecting it. But within a few years, as the winds of fashion blew stronger from France than from Germany, their admiring audience, so it now seems, stopped reading the book itself, and instead simply hijacked its title. They put it to their own peculiarly solipsistic uses, few of which Berger or Luckmann found appealing. As Berger later observed, ‘it was not unpleasant to bask in the favor of the zeitgeist,’ then recalled a favorite apothegm by Dean Inge: ‘He who marries the spirit of the age soon finds himself a widower’ (Berger, 2011: 75). They have agreed since that, should they rewrite the book, they would change little, even if their real authorial intentions have been lost on many readers.

Not only was the main title something of a scam, but so too was the haughty subtitle (A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge), which a recent sympathetic study called a ‘marketing ploy’ (Pfadenhauer, 2013: 128), aimed mostly at scholars in Germany, where Luckmann hoped to return. The two authors made much in their book of Arnold Gehlen’s and Helmuth Plessner’s ideas – neither of whom were well known in the States – and as Plessner observed in the German edition, ‘while many German sociologists would be irritated by the word “construction” in the title, they would be appeased by the subtitle, because “the sociology of knowledge is an old favorite of German readers”’ (Pfadenhauer, 2013: 128). As an aside I can hazard a guess as to why that is the case. Crafty German intellectuals adore the word sogenannt, meaning ‘so-called.’ They live to demystify, ironize, debunk, and satirize whatever beliefs someone proposes with which they disagree – often those originating in France – but not in a violent or overtly rude way, especially since the Second World War. They prefer to snicker rather than guffaw. For example, Alfred Schutz, Berger and Luckmann’s teacher and inspiration, wrote:

Structure determines among other things the social distribution of knowledge and its relativity and relevance to the concrete social environment of a concrete group in a concrete historical situation. Here are the legitimate problems of relativism, historicism, and the so-called sociology of knowledge. (Schutz, 1962: 149)

But we will not pursue that notion here, other than to note that Berger and Luckmann were not entirely earnest, were in fact rather calculating, in their choice of title and subtitle.

So, if the authors do not support postmodernist, egocentric denials of social structure that constitute so many constructivist positions – ‘some sort of auto-poetic exercise out of thin air . . . I consider social constructivism to be essentially metaphysical in the pejorative sense of the word,’ as Luckmann (2014) recently put it in a video interview – and if my approach to their ideas concerns ‘social construction as fantasy,’ in what way exactly do I spit into the enduring headwinds first created by Berger and Luckmann, then taken up by throngs of their misinterpreting admirers? To answer this thoroughly one would carefully have to turn back to the book itself, freeing it from a half-century of commentary and interpretative accretions. Only then could one attempt to perfect just the sort of tedious hermeneutics for which Berger and Luckmann had little patience, as evidenced by the tone and structure of the book itself. Only through this timeworn method would I be able to substantiate my long-held belief that SCR undercut a promising trajectory of what was at that time still a young mode of sociological inquiry, and which could have taken another and possibly more fruitful path, had it not been for their surprising ‘intervention.’ My response to SCR going back decades is that the first wave of Wissenssoziologie was torpedoed and heavily damaged by Berger and Luckmann, whose point of view and vocabulary its champions eagerly, if selectively, adopted. Such followers seemed happy to be free of the heavy scholarly and political/historical baggage that accompanied the opening salvos in the 1920s by Mannheim, Scheler, Lukács, or Grunwald. There being insufficient space here for such a thorough examination, what follows must serve as a prolegomenon to such an analysis.

My ‘data’ preliminary to discussing selected aspects of the book are these: 1) a careful rereading of the text itself after a hiatus of over 35 years, when I studied it in order to teach the book; 2) Bill Moyer’s 28-minute interview with Peter Berger in 1989 on video-tape, and several YouTube performances by Berger and one by Luckmann; 3) Berger’s private letters to and from Irving Louis Horowitz held in the Horowitz Archive in the Penn State Library, of which there are over 200 exchanged between 1965 and 1999; 4) study of all eight reviews the book received that I could find (Gustafson, 1968; Donald W. Light Jr., 1967; Ivan H. Light, 1969; Macquet, 1968; Martin, 1968; Rose, 1967; Simpson, 1967; Wagner, 1967). Neither The American Journal of Sociology nor Social Forces, two of the three top outlets at the time for sociological book reviews, published treatments of SCR, which may account for Luckmann’s mistaken impression that the book was not much reviewed when it first appeared; 5) Berger’s 2011 autobiography, and also Michaela Pfadenhauer’s recently published The New Sociology of Knowledge: The Life and Work of Peter L. Berger; 6) Schutz’s works; 7) Mannheim’s and Scheler’s works, most of which I first read carefully many years ago; and 8) books and articles that begin with ‘The Social Construction of Whatever,’ most notably Ian Hacking’s The Social Construction of What? (1999) and including Asia Friedman’s Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (2013). This is not necessarily a comprehensive basis for a hermeneutically keen assessment of SCR, but one does one’s best within limits.

At this point it is worth recalling that Berger’s autobiography carries the subtitle How To Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore, and, perhaps even more self-revelatory, the opening chapter of the same book is titled ‘Balzac on Twelfth Street.’ During a particularly fertile period of what he calls ‘bibliorrhea’ (Berger, 2011: 75), Berger composed his first novel, using the pseudonym Felix Bastian (p. 85). In 1964 he became bored while summering on Lake Maggiore in a beautiful southern canton of Switzerland, and used fiction-writing to dilute his tedium. He had long before been accused by a French professor of being more a littérateur than a social scientist (Berger, 2011: 84), and his novel-writing seemed to validate that diagnosis. The next summer he wrote a second novel, but it was not published until 10 years later by a small firm specializing in religious books, and was likely accepted because of the fame of his sociology titles from the 1960s rather than for its literary merit (Berger, 2011: 87). Yet he surely did not throw himself into the role of novelist with complete abandon. ‘I had realized by now how marginal I was to the mainstream of American sociology, and, after all, I was nursing dreams of building an empire with our new approach to sociological theory’ (Berger, 2011: 85) as announced in SCR. This accounts for his use of a pseudonym for his first novel, for fear of being tagged a mere littérateur by the fiercely scientistic people who bore the title ‘American sociologist.’ Berger and Luckmann were both acutely aware of their Eurocentric mode of scholarship, which became both their strength and their handicap, professionally speaking. It did not help that SCR’s endnotes were larded with a preponderance of references to untranslated German and French writings.

One senses from SCR that Berger, perhaps more than Luckmann, dreaded becoming a scholarly parody of a ‘real’ person, like George Eliot’s pretentious Casaubon, so in love with his own hyper-specialized knowledge that the ‘real world’ – Schutz’s ‘paramount reality’ – disappears from his blinkered view. Perhaps by spending two years in uniform at Fort Benning, Georgia, listening patiently to accounts of soldiers’ psychological crises, and trying to resolve them by means of the sociology he had learned at the New School, Berger could not become the otherworldly Luftmensch personified in Karl Mannheim, Max Scheler, and others who founded Wissenssoziologie, but instead evolved into a man of the people. He feared being seen as a Europeanized, self-absorbed bookworm. In another context, while lecturing in Iran 10 years later, he observed that ‘intellectuals are typically unaware of the stirrings in the bazaars of the “unenlightened”’ (Berger, 2011: 141), and this brand of shortsightedness he always strived to avoid. As for Luckmann, before repatriating to Germany he taught for a while in the US at Hobart College; the sort of experience that forces even the most elevated scholarly mind to come to terms with practical mundanity.

Even a casual reader of SCR will notice a few items of compositional interest – mannerisms and practices that might be considered ‘pre-substantive.’ To notice these rhetorical tics requires rereading the book with as much an eye for ‘mere style’ as for so-called ‘theory,’ to shift emphasis from one to the other, admitting that for its authors, style mattered. First, the ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–18), which the authors claim readers could reasonably skip, is lifted from an earlier article that raced through the history of Wissenssoziologie from Marx forward with dizzying speed and superficiality. It may have impressed American readers at the time because of its 28 endnotes citing 52 authoritative scholars, many in French and German. Or they may have taken the authors’ advice, and skipped reading it.

This section of SCR puts youthful effrontery on full display. Within this slight incursion into a difficult subject, Berger and Luckmann gallop through huge fields of thought on their determined way to a polemically anchored destination. They claim not to be argumentatively inspired, but the pretended neutrality of their prose belies that posture. Marx’s pivotal ideas about Unterbau and Überbau they damn with faint praise, eventually arguing that even his most gifted expositor, György Lukács, was too determinist when connecting a protagonist’s social position with the contents of his/her consciousness and speech (pp. 6–7). In a remarkable sleight of hand, they claim that Scheler’s, Mannheim’s, and Grünwald’s early versions of the sociology of knowledge – or ‘gnosio-sociology’ as renamed by Gerard de Gré – are defective because they dwell only on high cultural expression and politically sophisticated ideologies, apparently believing that ‘everyday life’ is unfit for analysis. Such a claim handily makes room for the Schutzian approach his two able students were proselytizing. Yet study of Scheler’s phenomenologically inspired work on sympathy, resentment, the humanly eternal, and so on, or Mannheim’s many essays on freedom, conservatism, the democratization of culture, mass education, inter alia, give the lie to this accusation. Yes, of course, they were Teutonic mandarins of a high order, but this did not automatically mean they were blind to ‘the everyday’ in their analyses.

Because Berger and Luckmann cite many pertinent works by title, even if with sparse specific quotations or page numbers, they appear to have surveyed the field judiciously and found it wanting. (It is likely they borrowed significantly from their teachers at the New School, Carl Mayer and Albert Salomon, and their peers, Kurt Wolff and Friedrich Tenbruck; p. vii.) They cite none of Scheler’s or Mannheim’s many works except by title, and were therefore unable to ‘prove’ the strength of their complaints in the conventional way. Readers in the US, unable to read the originals or exhausted by the translations, might well have believed they were being gently led out of the perdition of European Wissenssoziologie and into the more sensible and accessible zone of ‘social constructionism.’

What a relief that must have been for those who had found Mannheim’s work, not to mention Scheler’s, difficult to digest. And yet consider one contrary quotation among hundreds from Mannheim’s most famous book, apparently contradicting Berger and Luckmann’s most general complaint, that the sociology of knowledge concerned itself only with high culture and politics. From Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia:

This ‘debunking’ tendency in the thought of our time has become very marked. [Note 8: Carl Schmitt analyzed this characteristic contemporary manner of thought very well when he said that we are in continual fear of being misled. Consequently we are perpetually on guard against disguises, sublimations, and refractions . . .] And even though in wide circles this trait [the debunking tendency] is considered undignified and disrespectful (and indeed insofar as ‘debunking’ is an end in itself, the criticism is justified), this intellectual position is forced upon us in an era of transition like our own, which finds it necessary to break with many antiquated traditions and forms. (Mannheim, 1936: 64)

This could not be clearer or more ‘down to earth,’ not to mention as relevant now as then, if not more so. In fact, it summarizes precisely what Erving Goffman proposed about 25 years later, and of which Berger and Luckmann made approving use. It is a fool’s errand to dismiss Scheler and Mannheim as mandarins without awareness of everyday dialogue. In fact Mannheim’s wife, Julia Mannheim-Lang, was a practicing psychoanalyst, and he thanks her for informing his own writing; for keeping it ‘grounded.’

There are other surface features of SCR which draw one’s attention during a close reading. Every social theorist falls in love with certain terms, either of their own invention, or as redefined to suit their project, and in this, Berger and Luckmann were no exception. Their prose did indeed flow nicely, except when it overstretched for pedantic effect, but there were certain ordinary words without which their argument would have become much weaker, and which became, perhaps unconsciously, their battle flags. Let us begin with the innocuous word ‘available.’ Of a dozen uses that I noted between pages 32 and 178, here is an early instance: ‘The typifications of habitualized actions that constitute institutions are always shared ones. They are available to all the members of the particular social group in question …’ (p. 54, original emphasis). Or from later in the book: ‘There is always more objective reality “available” than is actually internalized in any individual consciousness, simply because the contents of socialization are determined by the social distribution of knowledge’ (p. 134). Aside from sounding much like Marx, if lightened in complexion, this use of ‘available’ sounds almost like a magical incantation. One wonders what it means – ‘objective reality’ being ‘available’ in too large a form to saturate the socialization process, perhaps? In a section on roles (pp. 72–79), an orgy of ‘availables’ appears without warning or precedent (e.g. ‘a generally available pattern in a matrilocal society,’ ‘socially available typifications,’ ‘objectively available typifications,’ ‘objectively available world,’ and so on).

The Schutzian point Berger and Luckmann wish to emphasize is that what a person does in the social world, especially through language and patterned behavior, is there to be inspected, considered, appropriated perhaps, rejected at times, and otherwise influenced by others reciprocally in face-to-face situations. Hence they claim that such ‘typifications’ are ‘available’ to all members of small groups. Were Professor Berger to attend a convivial celebration of SCR today, he would indeed be ‘available’ to those around him, up to a point; the confreres could question him at will, and he would be obliged to answer or politely turn aside these inquiries. But immediately after this event, he would no longer be ‘available’ to anyone in attendance unless he chose to be. When Peter Berger visited the Vatican in 1969 and met Pope Paul VI, ‘availability’ was a very short-term mutual experience, likely unique in a given biography.

Marx, Mannheim, and others in the rejected Wissenssoziologie tradition, well understood and analyzed the likely lack of genuine reciprocity between persons of unequal rank; a reciprocity that Berger and Luckmann assume routinely exists, and which they dignify with the repeated term ‘dialectical.’ The earlier thinkers understood that, put in today’s terms, the Walmart ‘associate’ may well be ‘available’ to anyone who asks for help in the store, and is duty-bound to march the customer to the requested zone of purchase. But the customer is not in any sense ‘available’ to the associate except to boss her around, and the heirs to the Walmart empire fly so high above the earth’s surface in terms of wealth and status that they are unavailable to anyone but God. Or, more importantly, to Warren Buffett. This may seem like a trivial point, but it captures a thoroughgoing defect of the book’s tone, even as its authors try to escape micro-worlds and enter the macro.

In fact, Berger himself charmingly illuminates this tone when he refers to ‘a distinctively Viennese principle. I call it the “coffee-house principle”: If you collect the right people and have them sit together long enough, they are bound to come up with something interesting’ (Berger, 2011: 125). Berger invokes this imagery many times throughout his autobiography in explicit terms, and with obvious fondness, even nostalgia, for those mainly historical moments when intellectuals could gather in a relaxed setting and argue about whatever concerned them at the moment, for example:

There still [fall, 1963] were evening classes, lively and intellectually stimulating students, and the ambience of Greenwich Village with the cafes and bistros to which one could go after class. All in all, it was quite intoxicating after the Protestant sedateness I had left behind in Hartford. (Berger, 2011: 80)

Much later in his professional life he referred to ‘one coffee house morphing into the next coffee house . . . an alliance of coffee-house habitués . . . coffee houses piled upon coffee houses!’ (Berger, 2011: 193–194). Towards the end of his autobiography, Berger ponders his repeated return to this particular trope:

Perhaps I have overused the coffee house as a metaphor for a methodological habitus. It may simply be a reflection of a romantic image derived from my Viennese origins . . . The attitude of open-mindedness, of not taking oneself too seriously, of appreciating style and wit as enhancing understanding. Most important, it is a metaphor for a very important insight—that there are few pleasures in life to equal that of sustained conversation with intelligent, articulate people in a congenial environment . . . It helps if the conversation is fueled by coffee and is enveloped in pungent tobacco smoke. (Berger, 2011: 206)

Ever since Boswell’s Johnson, the 18th-century salon or coffee house has often been portrayed as the origin of what we now call, thanks to Habermas, ‘the public sphere,’ and as such is almost invariably praised for its nurturing nature when it comes to scholarly or literary creativity. Needless to say, there is nothing in the least wrong with longing for such a situation. Hemingway’s paean to Paris in the 1920s, the so-called ‘moveable feast,’ has long set the tone of veneration such settings enjoy, at least in fond retrospect. My surly objection revolves around what it presumes about social life when generalized, and what it omits – in particular any analytic concern for what Marx and his era called ‘the political-economy.’ One might argue that Berger later wrote about economics at some length, especially in Pyramids of Sacrifice and his enthusiastic endorsement in The Capitalist Revolution. But in SCR, the ‘real foundation’ Marx and others have defined as the keystone to sociological understanding is almost entirely absent. The detailed SCR index lists three minor mentions of economic relations, whereas ‘religion’ receives 14 and ‘types’ another 11. Polite interlocutors in the coffee house do not, perhaps, bring up such tawdry matters. (Oddly enough, though, Marx himself is mentioned four times in the text proper, with most of his citations relegated to the endnotes; the same for Durkheim.)

This ‘coffee house’ attitude, voiced 50 years after he and Luckmann drafted their manifesto for changing sociology, is evident throughout SCR, and most apparent whenever it probes micro-interactions. This is perhaps one of my strongest objections to the book’s subtitle – A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge – for what one gets is not in fact a sociology of knowledge, but a sociology of schmoozing, of good-natured, civilized, interactionally balanced, literate, well-intentioned, and salutary coffee house salon chatting. It is hard to imagine such a book being composed, for instance, by Herbert Blumer, another very astute student of interaction. He stood 6 foot, 1 inch, 200 lbs, and played guard and end in professional football for the Chicago Cardinals between 1925 and 1933, while at the same time earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He became George Herbert Mead’s most influential student, and founded the Berkeley sociology department. Much of his sociology grew out of labor settings and other ‘real-world’ venues. He would likely have found the Viennese coffee shop imagery intriguing but unconvincing when applied to the rough and tumble socio-economic world of the 1930s, about which he provided shrewd analyses. Nor would Norman Mailer, pugilistic novelist, have accepted the description of social life detailed in SCR. Nor would Jane Goodall, standing over the remains of her beloved chimps, slaughtered by humans for trivial reasons. Surely Weber, despite the putative importance his ideas held for Berger and Luckmann, and given his keen sense of military and political history, would have found their interactional worldview perplexing. And need one even mention the disturbed social world regularly offered up in the works of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (e.g. Dialectic of Enlightenment or Minima Moralia), or of their colleague, Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man)?

Violence, physical threats to safety, warmongering, economic and environmental destruction, genuine class conflict, and so many other obtrusive and ubiquitous ingredients in contemporary life – precisely those which in 1936 had so worried Mannheim – do not share the limelight in SCR when compared with lots of interactional ‘availability’: one attentive, perceptive person speaking with another. If Berger and Luckmann wanted, consciously or otherwise, to bury their early years enduring the terror that consumed Europe during the 1930s, this is understandable. Yet substituting for the realism of earlier works in Wissenssoziologie an interactional utopia sprung in part from Viennese novels (the estimable Heimito von Doderer is quoted; Berger, 2011: 112), or perhaps TV’s saccharine family shows of the 1950s, did nothing to advance what the sociology of knowledge can accomplish when given sufficient scope. It is not that SCR is uninteresting, or that the Schutzian–Meadian model of interaction is inauthentic or unuseful. Rather, when viewed via a Mannheimian lens, the book seems irresponsibly apolitical and free of sufficient political-economic insight, and thus, without really aiming to be, decidedly conservative when set beside its forbears in the sociology of knowledge. Given Berger’s later reputation – as a self-described, paid ‘spy’ for Big Tobacco against the anti-smoking lobby (Berger, 2011: 171), as an outspoken apologist for the benefits capitalism brings to its select participants, as an opponent of trendy Leftist campus causes during the 1970s and 1980s – such latent conservatism makes sense, and anticipates his later fondness for the so-called ‘neo-conservatives’ of the 1980s.

We began this pre-substantive ramble through SCR by commenting on ‘available’ as a term of art that carries a heavy load throughout the argument. There are other words which also become load-bearing beams in the Berger–Luckmann brownstone. (Luckmann says in his recent interview [2014] that he would have preferred the term ‘building’ to ‘construction’, hence my adoption of his metaphor here.) Another is ‘massive’ and ‘massivity’ featured between pages 30 and 164, as in the passage, ‘the massive evidence of the other’s subjectivity,’ and, in the same paragraph, ‘the massively real presence of his subjectivity’ (p. 30). Later in the book we learn that ‘Reality takes on massive proportions when entire social strata become its carriers’ (p. 127), or ‘The world of childhood is massively and indubitably real’ (p. 136). And in a sentence that displays a number of stylistic tropes common within the Berger–Luckmann social universe:

But even when the world of everyday life retains its massive and taken-for-granted reality in actu, it is threatened by the marginal situations of human experience that cannot be completely bracketed in everyday activity. There is always the haunting presence of metamorphoses . . . (p. 147)

The so-called ‘threat’ to equilibrium and biographical coherence posed by ‘marginal’ events, or social arrangements, or corruptions of character, obviously disturbed Berger and Luckmann, as well they might, considering the political circumstances of their childhoods. And childhood is given a great deal of attention in SCR; far more than in any other work in the sociology of knowledge to that point.

One wonders if the authors subconsciously slighted macro and political-economic analysis in favor of explaining intergenerational transmission of cultural traits, and the hallowed ‘taken-for-grantedness’ about which they wrote at such length. ‘Put crudely’ – another frequent expression in the book – did they give up on the Big Story in order to wrap themselves in the soft cloak of the social pianissimo, that precious social intimacy which Weber also found to be a relief from overwhelming rationalization processes? Recall one of Weber’s most famous passages, from the conclusion to a rare speech he gave to war-weary young scholars in November 1917, and which clearly spoke volumes to Berger and Luckmann:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’ Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our great art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together. (Weber, 1946: 155)

Yet Weber did not stop here. He accepted this desiccated condition of European life, and then compared it hopefully with all the social structures he could identify across time and place, hunting soberly for an escape hatch from the ‘iron cage.’

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. (Weber, 1946: 155)

Is it ‘accidental’ that both Berger and Luckmann have written so much about religiosity, about the failure of secularization to wipe out religious sentiment? Here they and Weber part company.

Finally, in terms of specially freighted words, there is ‘concrete.’ As in the Schutz passage quoted above (Schutz, 1962: 149), where ‘concrete’ appears thrice in one sentence, this is a metaphorical image that means a great deal, particularly among German theorists. Marx used the word often, and others have followed. In fact, it appears in Hegel, too. There is nothing wrong, of course, with emphasizing that certain human relationships are durable, strong, reliable, and readily ‘available,’ and thus are ‘concrete’ by nature. The problem comes when theorists reify the adjective and begin to think that by saying relationships are ‘concrete,’ a measure of permanence is bequeathed to human interactions which overstates their durability and camouflages the fleeting, unstable, and asymmetric qualities of interaction. It is based on spoken language, on gestures, mannerisms, clothing and other external accoutrements too subtle to recount, but all of which are also ephemeral in an ontological sense. When a human dies, survivors say in wonderment, ‘one minute they were there, and the next, gone!’ So, too, spoken interactions. We would like to capture such moments and bottle them for later use – the moment when a marriage proposal was accepted, when a doctorate was granted, when cancer was beaten – but they resist any kind of real memorialization. By relying from page 36 to page 138, here and again, on images of the ‘concrete’ in social life, Berger and Luckmann dutifully follow Schutz’s lead. But in so doing they indulge in a comforting fantasy that seems to become ever more elusive as the world grows in population, complexity, variety, and hyper-communication. If humans truly operated in a concrete fashion in concrete relationships of concrete trust and predictability, the Geneva Convention would work, slavery would disappear, and the thriving business of war would diminish.

This prolegomenon to a full-scale ‘hermeneuticization’ of SCR ends with a bit of attention to the concept of ‘fantasy’ in my title. Alfred Schutz, in Volume One of his Collected Papers, within the famous essay ‘On Multiple Realities,’ introduced a subsection which he named ‘The Various Worlds of Phantasms’ (Schutz, 1962: 234–239). The Social Construction of Reality draws throughout both silently and explicitly on Schutz, yet this tiny part of his oeuvre does not seem to have played a large role in the authors’ thinking. (Quite parenthetically, Schutz’s name in early Berger articles appears with an umlaut over the ‘u,’ but later on does not. The case of the vanishing umlaut may have phenomenological significance, or perhaps merely illustrates the attempted Americanization of a starkly European author; or it may have had more to do with Schutz’s import–export day job than his evening courses at the New School.) In a passage dedicated to disentangling the meaning of ‘marginal situations’ as they accost character and personality, Berger and Luckmann write: ‘Such situations are experienced in dreams and fantasies as provinces of meaning detached from everyday life, and endowed with a peculiar reality of their own’ (p. 96). As they near the end of their disquisition, they then note that:

The unsuccessfully socialized individual himself is socially predefined as a profiled type — the cripple, the bastard, the idiot, and so on. Consequently, whatever contrary self-identifications may at times arise in his own consciousness lack any plausibility structure that would transform them into something more than ephemeral fantasies. (pp. 165–166)

A few pages later we read, ‘The subjectively chosen identity becomes a fantasy identity, objectified within the individual’s consciousness as his “real self”’ (p. 171). Finally, and closer to Schutz’s concerns, Berger and Luckmann write that ‘Dreams can be more easily quarantined within consciousness as “nonsense” to be shrugged aside or as mental aberrations to be silently repented; they retain the character of phantasms vis à vis the reality of everyday life’ (p. 147).

In a dense six-page meditation on phantasms and phantasizing, Schutz brings Husserl into play, and transfers the latter’s philosophical analysis about the topic into a more social-psychological vein, partly by also calling on William James (Schutz, 1962: 234–240). Though hard to summarize fairly, a few remarks stand out, for example:

Imagining itself is, however, necessarily inefficient and stays under all circumstances outside the hierarchies of plans and purposes valid within the world of working. The imagining self does not transform the outer world. (p. 236)

Not surprisingly, this coincides with Berger and Luckmann’s appraisal of fantasy as a component of lived experience. Schutz pushes this viewpoint further:

In my imagery I may fancy myself in any role I wish to assume. But doing so I have no doubt that the imagined self is merely a part of my total personality, one possible role I may take, a Me, existing only by my grace. (p. 239)

So far, nothing special has occurred, and then, in the concluding paragraph, Schutz displays a penetrating sense of ‘phantasms’ that is lacking in most of SCR, to wit:

Imagining can be lonely or social and then take place in We-relation as well as in all of its derivations and modifications . . . The freedom of discretion of the imagining self is here a very large one. It is even possible that the phantasm may include an imagined cooperation of an imagined fellow-man to such an extent that the latter’s imagined reactions may corroborate or annihilate my own phantasms. (p. 240)

When one studies SCR, this phrase of Berger and Luckmann’s adored teacher speaks very loudly indeed: ‘imagined cooperation of an imagined fellow-man.’ It fairly leaps off the page. Perhaps because he was a businessman in New York City, he understood phantasmagorics in a way that his earnest students did not. Whatever the cause, Schutz saw that wishing for a society constituted by characters who would have been at home in Samuel Johnson’s coffee shop, Boswell in the corner furiously noting every word, does not make it so.

In an unpublished letter from Peter Berger to Irving Louis Horowitz dated 21 August 1999, Berger apologizes for being unable to attend the latter’s 70th birthday party at the Princeton Club in September. Telling Horowitz that his own 70th birthday has been a good thing, he explains that

I now feel fully legitimated in saying anything that comes to my mind and be as offensive as I want. Perhaps we can collaborate in a worthwhile project of becoming Impossible Old Men! And, of course, I love that we can continue to collaborate [in] the various efforts to debunk the assorted intellectual imbecilities of our time. (Horowitz, 1999)

It is good to know from this document that the ever-humorous Berger had learned in the second half of his three score and ten years that the ‘taken-for-granted paramount reality’ of everyday life can be as much given over to ‘imbecilities’ as to the sensible give-and-take he and Luckmann hungered for in the early 1960s, when everybody was young and anything was possible.