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Peter L. Berger

Peter Ludwig Berger (17 March 1929 – 27 June 2017) was an Austrian-born American sociologist and Protestant theologian. Berger became known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theoretical contributions to sociological theory.

Berger is arguably best known for his book, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York, 1966), which is considered one of the most influential texts in the sociology of knowledge and played a central role in the development of social constructionism. In 1998 the International Sociological Association named this book as the fifth most-influential book written in the field of sociology during the 20th century. In addition to this book, some of the other books that Berger has written include: Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (1963); A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (1969); and The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967).

Berger spent most of his career teaching at The New School for Social Research, at Rutgers University, and at Boston University. Before retiring, Berger had been at Boston University since 1981 and was the director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture.

Family life
Peter Ludwig Berger was born on March 17, 1929, in Vienna, Austria, to George William and Jelka (Loew) Berger, who were Jewish converts to Christianity. He emigrated to the United States shortly after World War II in 1946 at the age of 17 and in 1952 he became a naturalized citizen. He died on June 27, 2017, in his Brookline, Massachusetts, home after a prolonged illness.

On September 28, 1959, he married Brigitte Kellner, herself an eminent sociologist who was on the faculty at Wellesley College and Boston University where she was the chair of the sociology department at both schools. Brigitte was born in Eastern Germany in 1928. She moved to the United States in the mid-1950s. She was a sociologist who focused on the sociology of the family, arguing that the nuclear family was one of the main causes of modernization. Although she studied traditional families, she supported same-sex relationships. She was on the faculties of Hunter College of the City University of New York, Long Island University, Wellesley College, and Boston University. Additionally, she was author of Societies in Change (1971), The Homeless Mind (1974), The War over the Family (1984), and The Family in the Modern Age (2002). Brigitte Kellner Berger died May 28, 2015.

They had two sons, Thomas Ulrich Berger and Michael George Berger. Thomas is himself a scholar of international relations, now a Professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and author of War, Guilt and World Politics After World War II (2012) and Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (2003).

Education and career
After the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, Berger and his family emigrated to Palestine, then under British rule. He attended a British high school, St. Luke's. Following the German bombings of Haifa, he was evacuated to Mount Carmel, where he developed his life-long interest in religion. In 1947 Berger and his family emigrated again, this time to the United States, where they settled in New York City. Berger attended Wagner College for his Bachelor of Arts and received his MA and PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York in 1954. Berger, in his memoir, described himself as an "accidental sociologist", enrolling here in an effort to learn about American society and help become a Lutheran minister, and learning under Alfred Schütz. In 1955 and 1956 he worked at the Evangelische Akademie in Bad Boll, West Germany. From 1956 to 1958 Berger was an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro; from 1958 to 1963 he was an associate professor at Hartford Theological Seminary. The next stations in his career were professorships at the New School for Social Research, Rutgers University, and Boston College. Starting in 1981, Berger was the University Professor of Sociology and Theology at Boston University. He retired from BU in 2009. In 1985 he founded the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, which later transformed into the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs (CURA), and is now part of the Boston University Pardee School of Global Studies. He remained the Director of CURA from 1985 to 2010.

The original Peter L. Berger Papers are deposited in the Social Science Archive Konstanz.

CURA
Berger founded the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University in 1985. It is a world-center for research, education, and public scholarship on religion and world affairs. Some of the questions it attempts to answer are: How do religion and values affect political, economic, and public ethical developments around the world? Defying earlier forecasts, why have religious actors and ideas become more rather than less globally powerful in recent years? and In a world of increasing religious and ethical diversity, what are the implications of the revival of public religion for citizenship, democracy, and civil coexistence? CURA has over 140 projects in 40 countries.

Religious views
Berger was a moderate Christian Lutheran conservative whose work in theology, secularization, and modernity at times has challenged the views of contemporary mainstream sociology, which tends to lean away from any right-wing political thinking. Ultimately, however, Berger's approach to sociology was humanist with special emphasis on "value-free" analysis.

The social construction of reality
As explained in Berger's and Thomas Luckmann's book The Social Construction of Reality (1966), human beings construct a shared social reality. This reality includes things ranging from ordinary language to large-scale institutions. Our lives are governed by the knowledge about the world that we have and we use the information that is relevant to our lives. We take into account typificatory schemes, which are general assumptions about society. As one encounters a new scheme, one must compare it to the ones that are already established in one's mind and determine whether to keep those schemes or replace the old ones with new ones. Social structure is the total of all these typificatory schemes. While Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) did not elaborate a sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann acknowledge the centrality of Schutz for their understanding of what theoretical ingredients ought to be added.

The reality of everyday life
Berger and Luckmann present "the reality of everyday life" as the sphere of reality that impinges upon human existence most intensely and immediately. Everyday life contrasts with other spheres of reality – dreamworlds, theatre – and is considered by a person to be objective,  intersubjective (shared with others) and self-evident. Life is ordered spatially and temporally. Spatial ordering allows interaction with other people and objects; the human ability to manipulate zones of space can intersect with another's ability.

"The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It does not require additional verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as self-evident and compelling facticity."

Social interactions in everyday life favour personal, face-to-face encounters as the best scenarios where human beings can actually connect with each other through interactions. Humans perceive the other in these interactions as more real than they would themselves; we can place a person in everyday life by seeing them, yet we need to contemplate our own placement in the world, as it is not so concrete. Berger believes that although you know yourself on a much deeper scale than you would the other person, they are more real to you because they are constantly making "What he is" available to you. It is difficult to recognize "What I am" without separating oneself from the conversation and reflecting on it. Even then, that self-reflection is caused by the other person's interactions leading to that self contemplation.

Language is imperative to the understanding of everyday life. People understand knowledge through language. The knowledge relevant to us is the only necessary knowledge to our survival, but humans interact through sharing and connecting the relevant structures of our lives with each other. Language helps create shared symbols and stocks of knowledge, and participation in these things inherently makes us participate in society.

Social reality on two levels
Social reality exists at both the subjective and objective levels. At the subjective level, people find reality personally meaningful and created by human beings in aspects such as personal friendships. At the objective level, people find reality in aspects such as government bureaucracies and large corporations, where reality is seen as more out of one's control.

Society as objective and subjective
Objectively, social order is a product of our social enterprise: it is an ongoing process that results from human activity. Institutions are a product of the historicity and need to control human habitualization (the repeated behaviours or patterns). The shared nature of these experiences and their commonality results in sedimentation, meaning they lose their memorability. Many behaviours lose sedimented institutional meanings. Institutional order involves specified roles for people to play. These roles are seen as performing as this objective figure – an employee is not judged as a human but by that role they have taken.

The process of building a socially-constructed reality takes place in three phases:

 * Externalization is the first step in which humans pour out meaning (both mental and physical) into their reality, thus creating things through language. In externalization, social actors create their social worlds and it is seen through action.
 * Following that, reality becomes established by the products of externalization through the course of objectivation (things and ideas "harden" in a sense). People see either a social practice or institution as an objective reality that cannot be changed, such as something like language.
 * Lastly, this newly-made and man-made reality (or society) has an effect on humans themselves. In this third phase, internalization, the external, objective world to a person becomes part of their internal, subjective world. As social actors we internalize norms and values, accepting them as givens, and make them our reality.

Levels of socialization
Subjectively, we experience first and second socializations into society. Firstly, family members and friends socialize one into the world during one's childhood. Secondly, during one's adulthood, one internalizes institutional "sub worlds" put in various positions in the economy. We maintain our subjective world through reaffirmation with social interactions with others. Our identity and our society are seen as dialectically related: our identity is formed by social processes, which are in turn ordered by our society. Berger and Luckmann see socialization as very powerful and able to influence things such as sexual and nutritional choices. People have the ability to do whatever they want in these spheres, but socialization causes people to only choose certain sexual partners or certain foods to eat to satisfy biological needs.

Humanistic perspective
The humanistic perspective is generally outside of mainstream, contemporary sociology. It is considered as a view that relates more to the humanities – literature, philosophy – than to social science. Its ultimate purpose lies in freeing society of illusions to help make it more humane. In this sense, we are the "puppets of society", but sociology allows us to see the strings that we are attached to, which helps to free ourselves. Berger's Invitation to Sociology outlines his approach to the field of sociology in these humanistic terms. Methodologically, sociologists should attempt to understand and observe human behaviour outside the context of its social setting and free from whatever influence a sociologist's personal biases or feelings might be. The study of sociology, Berger posits, should be value-free. Research should be accrued in the same manner as the scientific method, using observation, hypothesis, testing, data, analysis and generalization. The meaning derived from the results of research should be contextualized with historical, cultural, environmental, or other important data.

View of sociology
Berger saw the field of sociology as not only just a way to help people and the community, but sociological insights are also important to all people interested in instilling action in society. Sociologists are a part of a multitude of fields, not just social work. Berger stated that sociology is not a practice, but an attempt to understand the social world. These understandings could be used by people in any field for whatever purpose and with whatever moral implications. He believed that sociologists, even if their values varied greatly, should at the very least have scientific integrity. Sociologists are only humans and will still have to deal with things such as convictions, emotions, and prejudices, but being trained in sociology should learn to understand and control these things and try to eliminate them from their work. A sociologist's job is to accurately report on a certain social terrain. Sociology is a science, and its findings are found through observation of certain rules of evidence that allow people to repeat and continue to develop the findings.

Religion and the human problems of modernity
Berger believed that society is made aware of what he referred to as the nomos, or the patterns a particular society wants its members to see as objectively right and to internalize. The nomos is all the society's knowledge about how things are, and all of its values and ways of living. This is upheld through legitimacy, either giving special meaning to these behaviors or by creating a structure of knowledge that enhances the plausibility of the nomos. The existence of an eternal cosmic entity that legitimizes a nomos makes the nomos itself eternal; an individual's actions within its set society are all based on a universal and orderly pattern based on their beliefs.

Modern pluralization, which has stemmed from the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, set forth a new set of values, including: separation of the religious and secular spheres of life, a person's wealth as a determinant of value, maximizing freedom to enhance wealth, increasing prediction and control to increase wealth, and identifying oneself as a member of a nation-state. This, in turn, spread capitalism and its ideals and beliefs of individualism and rationalization and separated Christians from their God. With globalization, even more beliefs and cultures were confronted with this.

Berger believed that modernity – technological production paradigms of thinking and bureaucracy, namely – alienated the individual from primary institutions and forced individuals to create separate spheres of public and private life. There is no plausibility structure for any system of beliefs in the modern world; people are made to choose their own with no anchors to our own perceptions of reality. This lowers feelings of belonging and forces our own subjectivities onto themselves. Berger called this a "homelessness of the mind." It is the product of the modern world, he believed, as it has transformed the technology of production into our consciousness, making our cognition componential, always searching for a "means to an end." Ideas and beliefs are varied in the modern world, and an individual, not sharing their system of beliefs with the public whole, relegates any behaviors that are contingent on it to their private life. Certain beliefs that an individual has that may not be widely accepted by society as a whole, are then kept to one's self and may only be seen within one's private life and are not seen by society.

The socialist myth, a non-pejorative term of Berger's, actually arises from intellectual leftism masking a need to resolve the lacking sense of community in the modern world through the promise to destroy the oppression of capitalism. Berger believed resolving community in modern society needs to emphasize the role of "mediating structures" in their lives to counter the alienation of modernity. Human existence in the age of modernity requires there to be structures like church, neighbourhood, and family to help establish a sense of belonging rooted in a commitment to values or beliefs. This builds a sense of community and belonging in an individual. In addition, these structures can serve a role in addressing larger social problems without the alienation that larger society creates. The role of mediating structures in civil society is both private and public, in this sense.

Pluralism
The general meaning of pluralism is the coexistence, generally peaceful, of different religions, worldviews, and value systems within the same society. Berger believes pluralism exists in two ways. The first being that many religions and worldviews coexist in the same society. The second is the coexistence of the secular discourse with all these religious discourses. Some people avoid pluralism by only operating within their own secular or religious discourse, meaning they do not interact with others outside of their beliefs.

A feature of pluralism generally today is that it is globalized. Berger sees benefits in pluralism. One is that very rarely is there complete consensus in beliefs; this allows people to form and hold their own differing beliefs: society is such that people do not all try to hold and conform to the same beliefs. This ties into a second benefit: that pluralism gives freedom and allows people free decisions.

A third benefit is that - if pluralism is connected to religious freedom - then religious institutions now become voluntary associations. Lastly, pluralism influences individual believers and religious communities to define the core of their faith separately from its less central elements. This allows people to pick and choose between certain aspects of their chosen form of belief - that they may or may not agree with - while still remaining true to the central parts of it.

Transcendence
In daily life, people experience symbols and glimpses of existence beyond empirical order and of transcendent existence. Berger calls these "rumours of angels". People feel in times of great joy, in never-ending pursuit of order against chaos, in the existence of objective evil, and in the sense of hope that there exists some supernatural reality beyond that of human existence. People who choose to believe in the existence of a supernatural other require faith – a wager of belief against doubt – in the modern rationalised world. Knowledge can no longer sufficiently ground human belief in the pluralized world, forcing people to wager their own beliefs against the current of doubt in our society.

Secularization theory
Like most other sociologists of religion of his day, Berger once predicted the all-encompassing secularization of the world. He has admitted to his own miscalculations about secularization, concluding that the existence of resurgent religiosity in the modernised world has proven otherwise. In The Desecularization of the World, he cites both Western academia and Western Europe itself as exceptions to the triumphant desecularization hypothesis: that these cultures have remained highly secularized despite the resurgence of religion in the rest of the world. Berger finds that his and most sociologists' misconsensus about secularization may have been the result of their own bias as members of academia, which is a largely atheist concentration of people.

Theoretical contributions
In Making Sense of Modern Times: Peter L. Berger and the Vision of Interpretive Sociology, James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay build upon the social theories of Berger's. Hunter and Ainlay use Berger's ideologies as a foundation and framework for this particular book. Nicholas Abercrombie begins by examining his reformation of the sociology of knowledge. Shifting his focus on the subjective reality of everyday life, Berger enters a dialogue with traditional sociologies of knowledge – more specific, those of Karl Marx and Karl Mannheim. Abercrombie digs deeper into this dialogue Berger brings up, and he considers ways in which Berger goes beyond these figures. Stephen Ainlay then pursues the notable influence on Berger's work.

In the field of sociology, Berger has been somewhat excluded from the mainstream; his humanistic perspective was denounced by much of the intellectual elite in the field, though it sold well over a million copies. Berger's leftist criticisms do not help him much in that regard either. Berger's theories on religion have held considerable weight in contemporary neoconservative and theological fields of thinking, however.

In 1987 Berger argued about the emergence of a new social class he called the "knowledge class". He views it as a result of what was known as the middle class into two groups: the "old middle class" of those who produce material goods and services and the "knowledge class" whose occupations relate to the production and distribution of "symbolic knowledge." He followed Helmut Schelsky's definition of Sinn- und Hellsvermittler, "agents (intemediaries) of meanings and purposes".

Influences
Berger's work was notably influenced by Max Weber. Weber focused on the empirical realities of rationality as a characteristic of action and rationalization. In comparison, Berger proposed the usage of the word 'options' rather than freedom as an empirical concept. Therefore, much of the empirical work of Berger and Weber have revolved around the relationship between modern rationalization and options for social action. Weber argued that rationalism can mean a variety of things at the subjective level of consciousness and at the objective level of social institutions. The connection between Berger's analysis of the sociology of religion in modern society and Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism aligns. Weber saw capitalism as a result of the Protestant secularization of work ethic and morality in amassing wealth, which Berger integrates into his analysis about the effects of losing the non-secular foundations for belief about life's ultimate meaning.

Berger's own experiences teaching in North Carolina in the 1950s showed the shocking American prejudice of that era's Southern culture and influenced his humanistic perspective as a way to reveal the ideological forces from which it stemmed.

Honors
Berger was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982. He was doctor honoris causa of Loyola University, Wagner College, the College of the Holy Cross, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Geneva, and the University of Munich, and an honorary member of many scientific associations.

In 2010, he was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen.

Works

 * The Precarious Vision: A Sociologist Looks at Social Fictions and Christian Faith (1961)
 * The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (1961)
 * Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective (1963)
 * The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966) with Thomas Luckmann
 * The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (1967)
 * A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (1969)
 * ''Movement and Revolution (1970) with Richard John Neuhaus
 * Sociology (1972) with Brigitte Berger. Basic Books.   –    Dutch translation: Sociologie (1972). Basisboeken
 * The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (1973) with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner. Random House
 * Pyramids of Sacrifice: Political Ethics and Social Change (1974)
 * Facing Up to Modernity: Excursions in Society, Politics and Religion (1979)
 * The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (1979)
 * Sociology Reinterpreted, (with Hansfried Kellner) (1981)
 * The Other Side of God: A Polarity in World Religions (editor, 1981)
 * The War Over the Family: Capturing the Middle Ground (1983) with Brigitte Berger
 * The Capitalist Revolution (1986) New York: Basic Books
 * The Capitalist Spirit: Toward a Religious Ethic of Wealth Creation (editor, 1990)
 * A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in an Age of Credulity (1992)
 * Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (1997)
 * Four Faces of Global Culture (The National Interest, Fall 1997)
 * The Limits of Social Cohesion: Conflict and Mediation in Pluralist Societies: A Report of the Bertelsmann Foundation to the Club of Rome (1998)
 * The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (editor, et al., 1999)
 * Peter Berger and the Study of Religion (edited by Linda Woodhead et al., 2001; includes a Postscript by Berger)
 * Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (2002) with Samuel P. Huntington. Oxford University Press
 * Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Affirmation of Christianity (2003). Blackwell Publishing
 * Religious America, Secular Europe? (with Grace Davie and Effie Fokas) (2008)
 * In Praise of Doubt: How to Have Convictions Without Becoming a Fanatic (2009) with Anton Zijderveld. HarperOne
 * Dialogue Between Religious Traditions in an Age of Relativity (2011) Mohr Siebeck
 * The Many Altars of Modernity. Towards a Paradigm for Religion in a Pluralist Age (2014)
 * Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore (2011) Prometheus Books

title: Peter L. Berger


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Wikipedia talk:Requested articles/geography

The following dialog took place a month ago regarding alphabetization and formatting of nations and their subgroups. It took place BEFORE the Requested articles/geography was created, but the discussion still pertains. We don't need to have the word Geography with each entry anymore, because the entire page is devoted to the subject....but we do need to keep to the alphabetization format that is described. Kingturtle 23:05, 5 Dec 2003 (UTC)

In order for the alphabetization format to work for this article, the geography category needs to be listed heirachically. If country names are simply listed, justified all the way to the left, it confuses the alphabetization. Kingturtle 10:45, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

 * What you reverted looked like this

Afghanistan

 * blah

United States

 * blah also
 * but there was an intermediate version as you describe it. Morwen 11:21, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

It needs to look like this:

Geography

 * Afghanistan
 * Blah
 * Australia
 * Blah

This way it is much easier for the eye to follow the alphabetization of the major categories. Kingturtle 11:28, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

How about

Geography: Canada
The section is ridiculously long compared to the others and definitely needed breaking up. Morwen 11:33, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Morwen 11:33, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

 * That solution would be better. That is how we solved the Countries part. Kingturtle 11:35, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


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User:Bulbaboy

'''Note: There is an ongoing issue with users attempting to get Bar Ilan University blocked from editing, while impersonating me. I will not be editing from another account (unless I don't want to be identified as Bulbaboy in the first place), or vandalizing, and I am also in America, while Bar Ilan is (I believe) in Israel.'''

Hello, I'm a fellow Wikipedia user, and I'm pretty sure I registered during late October 2003 (not too long before my first registered contribution, if I remember correctly). I found out about Wikipedia in a Wired article about open source. I'm also registered on Wikibooks, with the username Bulbaboy.

Lately, I've been helping Fern with his website, Pokémon Tours, as I got Pokémon Colosseum before he did.

If you want to know, my current browser is Mozilla Firebird version 0.6.

Contributions
Here's a list of the articles that I consider myself to have made a significant contribution to:

 * Redwall

And here's a list of articles that I've standardized or created according to WikiProject Pokédex:

 * Staryu
 * Ditto

title: User:Bulbaboy


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Thomas Luckmann

Thomas Luckmann (October 14, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany. Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck. He married Benita Petkevic in 1950. His contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science. His best-known titles are the 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (co-authored with Peter L. Berger), The Invisible Religion (1967), and The Structures of the Life-World (1973) (co-authored with Alfred Schütz)

Early life
Luckmann was born in 1927 in Jesenice, Slovenia which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He had an Austrian father who was an industrialist, his mother was from a Slovene family from Ljubljana. On his mother's side, he was the cousin of the Slovene poet Božo Vodušek. As a kid he was exposed to two vastly different cultures, and Luckmann had the advantage of growing up in a bilingual environment speaking both Slovene and German. He attended Slovene-language schools while in Jesenice until the year 1941, when the occupation of Slovenia during World War II forced him to transfer to Klagenfurt high school in Austria. Later in 1943 he and his mother relocated to Vienna, after the death of his father and several other relatives during World War II. Living in Austria during this period automatically granted him German citizenship, and in 1944 he was drafted for the army, joining the Luftwaffe where he served as a Luftwaffenhelfer. Luckmann was transferred to a military hospital for minor injuries shortly before the end of the war. Luckmann was in the hospital in Bavaria when the United States liberated the region. After liberation, in 1945 Luckmann became a prisoner of war and escaped after three months. He then settled back to Vienna and graduated from "Notmatura."

Education Background
Luckmann attended high school in Klagenfurt, after he and his family fled Italian occupation in Ljubljana in 1941. After escaping being a prisoner of war, Luckmann began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and Innsbruck. He then went on and graduated from Notmatura, and from 1948 and on he began studying different subjects in the social science field. He then moved to the United States with his wife, Benita Petkevic, where he then studied at The New School in New York City. It was his time at The New College, did Luckmann begin to discern his career as a sociologist. He was taught by Alfred Schütz, Dorion Cairns, Albert Salomon, and Carl Meyer, they later became great influence on Luckmann. This was when he was first introduced to the sociological discipline, and then he got familiarized with Alfred Schütz's work on sociological phenomenology. He went on to meet Peter Berger, where he would later go on to co-author The Social Construction of Reality, which later ended up becoming one of his most notable works. Together, he and his colleagues produced some of the most influential sociological works of the 20th century.

Luckmann never intended to become a sociologist. His initial academic interests resided in linguistics, history and philosophy. At The New School, Luckmann primarily studied philosophy and chose to study sociology as a second subject after admiring how his teachers specialized in these dual subjects. For example, Luckmann was introduced to the sociology of religion when his teacher at the time, Carl Meyer, asked him to do field work about churches in Germany after World War II. Captivated by his experience in Germany, Luckmann used his fieldwork to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology. He obtained his first academic position at Hobart College, in Geneva, New York, before returning to teach at The New School after the death of Alfred Schütz. Luckmann was eventually granted a professorship position at The University of Frankfurt in 1965. After publishing two books in 1963 and 1966, and several successful essays, Luckmann worked as a professor of Sociology at the University of Konstanz in Germany from 1970 to his retirement, and later professor emeritus. It is noted that his time in at Konstanz was marked as an intense period of interdisciplinary work, in which he wrote multiple essays concerning communication, linguistics, literature and history.

Life Events
In 1950, Luckmann married Benita Petkevic, who was a Latvian-born social scientist who taught in Austria, Germany. It was said that their marriage was a turning point for his life, among many other factors. The couple had three daughters Maja, Mara, and Metka. On May 10, 2016, Luckmann died of cancer at the age of 88 at his home in Austria.

Legacy
Luckmann's ideas and theories have been influential within the field in sociology and has had a huge impact on the world and intellectual thought.

50th Anniversary Social Construction Thomas Luckmann.

Works
 Early Work

Luckmann worked as a chauffeur and his, Benita, worked as a typist when they first moved to New York. During this time, he continued studying sociology and philosophy at the New School for Research. It was there where he first met some of the great influences of his life, including Peter L. Berger.

Philosophy and Social Thought
Luckmann was a follower of the phenomenologically oriented school of sociology, established by the Austrian American scholar Alfred Schütz. He contributed to the foundation of phenomenological sociology, the sociology of religion in modern societies, and the sociology of knowledge and communication. The interdisciplinary nature of his work remains relevant in sociology and other disciplines today.

Social Constructionism
Social Constructionism focuses on the study of the process of social construction. It could be described as an "approach" that is neither a theory of religion or any other social phenomenon. In several of his works, he developed the theory of social constructionism, which argues that all knowledge, including the most basic common-sense knowledge of everyday reality, which included gender, ethnicity, nations, and religion. It's derived from and maintained by social interactions especially through language. Together with Peter L. Berger, he wrote the book The Social Construction of Reality, and it was published by 1966. The book was an important part of the move in sociology as it established "social construction" as part of sociological vocabulary. It was also particularly with the sociology of religion, away from the view of religion and religious values as central to the social order, arguing that social order is socially constructed by individuals and/or groups of individuals. Since publication, the book has been translated into thirteen different languages and serves as a cornerstone in sociological literature. Berger wrote on their experience writing the book saying "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."

Sociology of Religion
Following his field work in Germany and the completion of his dissertation, Luckmann was asked to complete several reviews on the surrounding sociological literature concerning religion. Disappointed by the positivistic, unauthentic views of a Church-backed sociology of religion, Luckmann was compelled to write The Invisible Religion in 1963. The book was then translated into English in 1967. Luckmann proposes that there are four derivative types of religion the first of those being a "is a universal and nonspecific elementary social form which is an objective total worldview providing social meaning for a society's existence." The second, "the specific institutional social form of religion constituted by configurations of religious representations form- ing a sacred cosmos which is part of the worldview." The third, "a universal nonspecific form of individual religiosity which is an internalized subjective system of relevance reflecting the objectivated universal and nonspecific elementary social form of religion." Lastly, "a specific biographical form of religiosity in individual consciousness." Drawing from Durkheim, Luckmann developed a functional perspective in his theoretical objectives. Luckmann's theory reiterate's Durkheim's notion that "the original symbol system whereby man emerged from the animal world was religious." Rather than reverting to popular explanations of secularization, Luckmann explained the emergence of a new kind of religion in the 20th century: private religion He explains the diffusion of world views and institutional de-specialization of religion led to a privatization, rather than a retreat, from religion. Though Luckmann initially received harsh criticisms, The Invisible Religion became a pivotal move within the sociology of religion in the 20th century, especially in conjunction with The Social Construction of Reality.

Sociology of Knowledge and Communication
Luckmann's contribution to the sociology of knowledge and communication is based on his careful analysis of the link between socio-cultural linguistic practices, and the construction of social reality. His sociology of knowledge provides a theoretical, framework that allows the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse. Based on his empirical research of conversational analysis, Luckmann explains his theory of “communicative genres” in which linguistic types, such as, gossip, proverbs, or jokes, all serve as forms of social knowledge, and act as tools for the formation of social structure. He offers a comprehensive view on society as symbolic order and ordering, including levels and actors' agencies, and the interplay between both. There's an emphasis the role of language and the daily "conversation machinery" for the construction of the shared social reality. His ethnography of speaking, modeled a social interactional code that gave a dissimilar approach to sources of social constraint.

Social Action
Luckmann continued this analysis of social action, and in 1982 he continued the work of Alfred Schütz, drawing on Schütz's notes and unfinished manuscripts to complete Structures of the Life-World, published (posthumously for Schütz) in 1982. Luckmann then built upon Schütz's analysis and published, Theory of Social Action in 1992.

Together with Richard Grathoff and Walter M. Sprondel, Luckmann founded the Social Science Archive Konstanz (also known as the Alfred Schütz Memorial Archives). What became the official archive of the German Sociological Association, Luckmann and his colleagues gathered research accounts of German social science.

In 1998 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

In 2004 Luckmann became an honorary member of the Slovenian Sociological Association. The German Sociological Association awarded him a prize for his outstanding lifetime contribution to sociology at its 2002 Congress, and Luckmann became an honorary member in 2016.

The original Thomas Luckmann Papers are deposited in the Social Science Archive Konstanz.

Essential bibliography

 * The Social Construction of Reality (1966, with Peter L. Berger)
 * The Invisible Religion (1967)
 * ''The Sociology of Language (1975)
 * Structures of the Life-World (1982, with Alfred Schütz)
 * Life-World and Social Realities (1983)
 * The Sociology of Language (1975)
 * Theory of Social Action (1992)

title: Thomas Luckmann


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Popageorgio is Nick Douglas, a writer born in 1984 and living in New York City. He has a blog.

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