An Interview with Peter L. Berger: Chamber Music at a Rock Concert

In your recent book of memoirs, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist, you mention that in the original outline of The Social Construction of Reality, which you set out with Thomas Luckmann, there was a final section of the book that was never written; it would be ‘a concluding portion dealing with historical variations in the social organization of meaning’ (Berger, 2011: 82). What were your plans for that closing section of the book?

Symbolic universes are historically relative; such issues, for example, as the notion of the self, change in different periods of     history. So it was a very ambitious idea that we could not possibly squish into that book; it could be a different project. So we gave it up after not thinking much about it.

For example, Luckmann, in his coauthorship with Alfred Schutz, The Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann, 1973), has a very interesting chapter on the limits of the human, [showing] that in various periods of history it is not clear where humans begin and where they end, for example in relationship to certain animals. Hittites in the ancient Middle East regarded horses, which were very important to them, as having the same legal status as human beings. So [there was] an expansion of the notion of the human. And there are various other possibilities here. It would be a very interesting project sometime; it would need a team, I do not think any one person could master it.

The same year when The Social Construction appeared, you published an article on ‘Identity as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge’ (Berger, 1966). And you have mentioned that Luckmann and you were thinking about a future work on the question of identity ¹ – you have even referred to its initial axiom: ‘Any identity is better than none’ (Berger, 2011: 97; Berger and Neuhaus, 1996: 202). It seems that you were thinking seriously about that project, but it was not fully developed.

That was a joke of mine, which I think is actually quite good: ‘Any identity is better than none.’ [… The project] was a bit more ambitious than just the issue of identity. We wanted to produce a sociology of psychology. When we were students – that was before the big move to the left – the New York intelligentsia was overwhelmingly oriented psychoanalytically. Almost everyone of my generation I knew at the time either was in psychoanalysis, or was planning to go to psychoanalysis, or had left psychoanalysis, and we were not very happy with the Freudian view of man. So we were going to produce a sociological psychology. I guess George Herbert Mead would have been the main character, and that would involve identity as a social construct and lots of other issues psychologists deal with, such as superego, conscience, and many other issues. But after we finished The Social Construction we did other things – in fact, both of us wrote a book on religion. ²

In The Social Construction you seemingly questioned the attempts to link the individual and society using Marxism and Freud (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 195–196), something that you rather did using phenomenology and pragmatism. ³

Pragmatism did not have much of an influence on either one of us. Phenomenology, beyond what Alfred Schutz did, was mostly Luckmann’s thing. I was not that interested in phenomenology, except for the use that Schutz made of it, which we could make use of. […] And many of the arousals or whatever Freud dealt with, I think, could be explained in much more sociological terms. The one person who tried this was Alfred Adler, who was the Austrian propagator of psychoanalysis: he wrote things that were very close to the sociology of the psyche, but I do not think that he finished the theory. So there are lots of threads, and somebody should take them up.

In The Social Construction you employ repeatedly Emile Durkheim’s idea of the objectivity of social phenomena. However, in the Introduction of the book (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 1–18) you made a genealogy of the sociology of knowledge that is rather ‘German-centric.’ One wonders what was your opinion on Durkheim as a sociologist of knowledge, on his theory of categories and classification in the way he worked those topics in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim, 1995) and other writings, which contained controversial hypotheses – like ‘the classification of things reproduces the classification of men’ (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963: 11).

Some people, French sociologists, I think, have compared Durkheim to Marxism – the Marxist notion of superstructure and substructure. There is something to that, but that did not interest us very much. It was much more the objectivity aspect that interested us. We had a very positive reaction about Durkheim in what we tried to do. Durkheim and Weber are commonly seen – and with good reason – as very different alternatives for sociological theory, and we tried to combine them. Durkheim’s analysis of the objectivity of social facts – through his famous sentence ‘consider social facts as things’ – is correct; but Weber who saw society as a construct out of human subjectivity is also correct. So the objectivity that Durkheim wrote about is produced by human beings; is constructed by human beings. And that is the way we tried to combine these two approaches, which are both correct, and not really contradictory.

In some of your writings you have described the intellectual context and your biographical situation in the process of writing The Social Construction, but have you thought about the extra-theoretical elements that could have influenced the book?

It is important to understand that we wrote this book on the very eve of, just before the great cultural revolution in the Western world. In the late 1960s, social sciences and other disciplines were flooded with various forms of neo-Marxism, and that was not at all our intention. We used Marx, but we were in no way Marxists. That also explains why the book initially was not much noticed, or was reinterpreted in terms of Habermas or other quasi-Marxist thinkers. In that noisy change in the cultural scene, our book did not fit at all. The late 1960s were in a way an enormous rock concert. I once wrote about this: ⁴ someone asked, Why did not The Social Construction of Reality immediately have a huge effect? The effect came much later, and my answer was that you cannot play chamber music at a rock concert. And compared to what was going on all around us in the social sciences, we were doing chamber music.

And regarding the social conditions of that time in the 1960s, when you were writing the book, was there something that you think was influential or important?

No, I do not think so. The big change occurred a little later. There was the University of California Free Speech Movement, there were the hippies, there were some things. But the real explosion came in the late 1960s, just after the book was written. Both of us are Europeans, from Central Europe – we both came to America at a relatively advanced age: I was about 18 and Luckmann was a few years older. That past, totalitarianism, Nazism, and Communism very much affected our thinking, in a negative way: what we wanted to write, what we wanted to do, was nothing at all out of those political movements. So that had an indirect effect.

You are well aware that your book was the starting point of a widespread use of the term ‘construction’, many of these uses with meanings that you probably did not expect. And you have said that probably nowadays, you might have used a different concept rather than ‘construction’ in the title of the book.

We may have; it is a bit radical. Marx said at some point, ‘I am not a Marxist.’ Luckmann and I have said a number of times, ‘We are not constructivists’. If you look at the particular use of constructivism in the postmodern kind of theory, it is very different from what we wanted to do. You have a number of people who say that nothing exists but interpretations: the text is not accessible, it is interpretations of the text which are accessible. And then, the more radical form is: ‘nothing exists except the text.’ In a way, if you follow this, it is the self-destruction of science. If there is nothing behind the interpretations, that is a kind of mad idealism; on the other hand, if all interpretations are equally valid, there is no truth whatsoever, only narratives that use that term. That is actually very close to schizophrenia, where one is unable to distinguish between reality and one’s own thoughts. So we have been very cautious in not identifying with constructivists or people who call themselves that; it does not mean that is all wrong, just that it is an emphasis we never intended. At this point, I would not change anything, I like the book as it is. The word ‘construction’ is provocative, I think in a useful way. We might have used the term ‘interpretation’ rather than ‘construction,’ but that would have been too weak. Let it stand.

After you finished the book, Luckmann and you moved to other problems, which were somehow connected to the sociology of knowledge, but not in a very evident way – you started working on religion, capitalism, and development. What are the connections between your sociology of knowledge and your later work?

Luckmann would have to speak for himself. There were very strong connections: he moved to the area of conversation analysis, which was pretty much sociology-of-knowledge oriented. In my case, [I went to Mexico] and my years there were very significant, because it was the first time I lived and thought in a country that was a developing society, and that influenced me pretty much. I got interested in underdevelopment (subdesarrollo, as it was then called), for truly humane reasons. I had never seen such poverty before as I saw in parts of Mexico, and that shocked me, so the political question interested me. What are the sources of poverty? And, more important, what are the ways of overcoming poverty? I was also quite sure that what the leftist social scientists – dependency theory and these people – were saying was a mistake. It was a mistake analytically, and if one followed it in practice, it would be a disaster. That, I was clear about; but what else to do, I was not so clear about. And in the book The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (Berger et al., 1973), the three of us who were the authors tried to build a theory of modernity – at least some aspects of the theory of modernity – which was not at all Marxist. (The funny thing is that it was a family thing: my wife and my brother-in-law were co-authors and we started working on the book in Cuernavaca.)

Now that you mention Mexico, and Cuernavaca in particular, I suppose you know that Erich Fromm was there in those years. Did you have a chance to meet him or to have any conversations with him?

No. I think I met him once, through [Ivan] Illich. But I do not remember exactly what the conversation was about.

And how was your relationship with Illich?

Ivan Illich was a very interesting person. We could not agree on anything. The public and the media thought he was a man of the left; he was not. He was ultra-conservative. His ideal was the Middle Ages, and I could not agree with that. We had one conversation when we talked about modernity and all its evils, and I said, ‘Look, whatever you say about modernity, in the premodern society most children died before the age of five. In a modern society, even if it is just beginning to be modernized, the majority of children reach adult age. You want to reverse that?’. He did not have an answer – well he did have an answer, he said, ‘We want modernity, but with new structures’. […] One of his earlier books, Medical Nemesis (Illich, 1976), began with a wonderful sentence: ‘The medical establishment has become a major threat to health’. He did not mince words. A very, very interesting man. ⁵

You have said that you changed your position regarding ‘secularization theory’, that first you assumed it uncritically and later on, you rejected it. Is there any other important idea from your earlier work on knowledge or social theory that you are not comfortable with?

In terms of social theory, no. From the time I was a student at the New School, and then through the work with Luckmann, and other things I have done since then, my basic sociological framework has been Weberian. That does not mean that I have some kind of Weberian orthodoxy – there are some aspects of Weber’s thought that I think are wrong. I have not changed about that at all; the main change of mind in my work as a sociologist was rather about secularization. In the beginning I assumed that secularization theory was correct. To put it in one sentence – it is more complicated than that, of course – the center of the theory was the proposition ‘More modernity means less religion’. That, by the way, was a very Eurocentric idea; it applies, perhaps, to Europe, but hardly anywhere else. It took me about 20 years to realize it, thanks to my years in Mexico (I worked in Mexico for three years) and then in other parts of the non-Western world that I got to know: Africa, other Latin-American countries and, very importantly, Asia. You should travel through India and say that modernity means the end of religion; it is plain crazy.

So secularization theory, at its core – some aspects of it are very useful – was a mistake, an empirical mistake. It took me some time to realize this. And of course, the next question is: What should replace secularization theory? I gradually came to the conclusion that what should replace it is a theory of pluralism. Modernity, I think, may or may not produce secularism or secularity; but almost inevitably, it produces plurality or pluralism. Not just in terms of religion, but in terms of the co-existence in a society of different worldviews, moral systems, et cetera. That is a very interesting problem also in terms of religion, but it is not the same problem as secularization. I now use the term ‘the two pluralisms’. What I mean by that is kind of a concession to secularization theorists. There are two meanings to pluralism. One is the usual meaning, ‘many religions in the same society’ (pluralistic America, in terms of different religions, an increasingly broad spectrum including religions from Asia and everywhere else); but there is also – and that was the kernel of truth in secularization theory – a secular discourse which is inevitable for modernity. There are aspects of modern society which are inevitably secular, leaving aside any religious ideas the person may have. I used the example of the pilot of an airplane, whose discourse while flying the airplane must be strictly secular: you cannot fly an airplane by Islamic law or anything like that. But apart from that, when [the pilot] returns to the ground and goes home and prays, perhaps tells his wife what to do, has a very strict regime for his children, he may be very traditional and have nothing to do with modernity, and that is important. I have enough chutzpah, as they say, to call it a new paradigm, which I think it is. Once you start thinking in those terms, things look very different from how they do in terms of secularization alone as the main modern development.

Thus I suppose it is not a coincidence that the late work that you co-authored with Thomas Luckmann is on Modernity, Pluralism and the Crisis of Meaning (Berger and Luckmann, 1995).

We did not say anything very important in that. It was a small pamphlet which the Bertelsmann Foundation asked us to write. We do not have disagreement on this at all. I think Luckmann would agree on most of what I said to you, except that his concept of religion is too broad – I do not like it. We talked about this for years. His view of religion is very Durkheimian: collective symbols, which is correct – he is with the Arunta in the Australia that Durkheim studied. But it does not help us very much in understanding American religion, or any contemporary society other than some primeval tribe in Amazonia. ⁶

You have had a difficult relationship with the discipline of sociology. You wrote Invitation to Sociology (1963), a book that has drawn many people to sociology. But many years later you wrote ‘Sociology: A Disinvitation?’ where you said that you had ‘little stake in [your] identity as a sociologist’ (1992a: 12). And recently in your memoirs (2011) you identify yourself as a sociologist. It seems that you have a tension with the discipline.

I do. The kind of sociology I learned at the New School, 50 years ago or so, has very little to do with what goes on with sociology today, except for the background – when people talk about the classics the important thing is that they are all dead. I would say sociology today – not only in the United States; it is just as bad in Europe – suffers from two diseases. One is a little older, it started in the 1950s, maybe even the 1940s, and I call it ‘methodological fetishism’. Whatever cannot be put in terms of statistical data is not real. That is crazy. I have no objection to survey techniques, they are very useful; but they do not help you to understand society as a whole. The other disease is ideological, and now is no longer a sort of neo-Marxism – although that is still around – but all comes out in the way of late-1960s countercultural, postmodern theory, feminist sociology, black sociology – sort of the sociology of identity. I have not been in a sociological convention for years, but I am told that when you go through the book exhibits, it is all in one direction: politically left or center and culturally anti-bourgeois, in one way or another. That is unfortunate. Even if my politics were left or center, which they are not, I would deplore that. A science that becomes an ideology is no longer a science. In American sociology, those two diseases comprise, I think, the output of about 80 percent of the sociologic profession. The remaining 20 percent do some interesting work, but they do not dominate the field.

[…] If you look through a sociological journal today – unless it is ideological – most of what people write about is very trivial, such as relationships between X-ray technicians and nurses in a hospital – well, if you run a hospital, that is very interesting; but otherwise, it is not very significant. What these earlier guys tried to understand was: what is our society going through, what is the direction of social change, what is modernity. And about that, you do not get much questioning today.

How about sociologies in other parts of the world. In your work you have become very comprehensive and global in understanding processes in different continents and cultures. Do you have a feeling about the discipline outside America?

In Europe, which I am most familiar with, it is not that different. In other parts of the world, frankly, I do not know. When I mention India, for example (I have been to India several times), I do not want to talk to sociologists. I am interested in the cultural change, in politics, in social change. So I do not have a very clear picture of global sociology. […] When I was in Mexico, everyone we talked to was a Marxist, without exception – from different branches of Marxism, but all in that direction. That, I understand, is no longer the case; but what has come since then, I honestly do not know, I have not studied it. A sociologist’s job is to understand sociology, not fellow sociologists.