Peter Berger on Modernization and Modernity

An Unvarnished Overview

Robert Bickel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351618915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

With particular attention to his work on modernization and modernity as construed by a sociologist of knowledge, this book offers a sympathetic exposition and evaluation of Peter Berger's work as one of the world's most accomplished and influential sociologists.

In the context of an examination of Berger's ongoing work on the social construction of reality, styles of consciousness, the role of science-based technology, pluralism, and other pertinent topics, the author also considers Berger's unique and thoughtful approach to research and theorizing. Berger's method of 'sociological tourism', which departs sharply from the current emphasis in the social sciences on ever more complex and ostensibly rigorous statistical procedures, provides a refreshing move away from the increasingly esoteric and sometimes alienating methodological self-consciousness that characterizes contemporary sociology.

With this distinctive approach, this book will appeal to scholars and students of sociology who share Berger's interest. The importance of modernization and modernity on a world scale is undeniable, and a deeper understanding of their nature and consequences, will also benefit members of the intelligent laity who are not sociological specialists but are open to new ideas that are clearly explained.

1 Background: Berger’s prose, presentation, and purpose

Peter Berger’s contribution to contemporary sociology is truly substantial, but perhaps easy to overlook. His notion of the social construction of reality quietly pervades much of the material that today’s sociologists produce (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Much like Durkheim (1912/1995) Berger has tacitly contributed to shaping the nature of sociological discourse in a taken-for-granted way and to a degree that are not commonly acknowledged. He has done this in a workmanlike fashion, often in the company of like-minded colleagues. (See, for example, Berger & Kellner, 1981; Berger, Neuhaus & Novak, 1994; Berger & Huntington, 2002.) All the while, Berger’s work has remained original, interesting, and more accessible than one expects from an author who addresses undeniably difficult issues.

Berger’s prose style is neither elegant nor convoluted. Though occasionally a bit cluttered, for the most part it is a model of plain-spoken clarity. One must remember, however, that Berger is an intellectual and a professional sociologist, typically writing for those who fit into the same or similar categories. Moreover, from time to time and source to source he may resort to the use of gratuitous neologisms, something that, in my experience, often leaves an author and his readers poorly served.

Nevertheless, judiciously phrased neologisms are consistent with Berger’s judgment that sociologists have an obligation to create concepts to serve the research purpose at hand. Berger is unconvinced by claims that the established conceptual apparatus known to most sociologists is sufficiently flexible and exhaustive in coverage to be of universal value. His indebtedness to phenomenology as rendered by Alfred Schutz has contributed to making Berger suspicious of the universality of any fixed set of concepts (see, for example, Schutz, 1967).

In The Homeless Mind (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973), for example, Berger invoked concepts of his own making, or concepts that he had borrowed from relatively obscure sources, in an effort to more effectively capture the complexities and difficult substantive concerns attendant to dealing sociologically with modernization and modernity. His use of these adventitious concepts, multisyllabic locutions like “mechanisticity” and “componentiality,” was prompted by Berger’s judgment that understanding and comparing the institutions and styles of consciousness in modernizing and modernized worlds is sufficiently difficult to require application of new and different ideas. Unfortunately, however, the result was a collection of neither stylistically attractive nor illuminating terms that occurred much less frequently than one might expect throughout the rest of the book.

On the oddly infrequent occasions in which I encountered one or more of these mystifying expressions I paused, translated it into everyday language or established social scientific concepts, and wondered why Berger had made this sort of translation necessary. Berger writes well enough, with a talent for making unfamiliar and multifaceted ideas manageable, and the neologisms and the concepts they purport to represent are more trouble than they’re worth.

This sort of misguided linguistic inventiveness represents the kind of terminological pretentiousness and confusion that makes outsiders suspicious of sociology as an intellectually constructive discipline. This is exactly the sort of ill-conceived conceptual apparatus that Berger himself has dismissed as “the technical dialect for which sociologists have earned a dubious notoriety” (Berger, 1963: vii).

One or another of these newly forged concepts from The Homeless Mind (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973) occasionally appears in Berger’s subsequent work (see, for example, Berger & Kellner, 1981; Berger & Huntington, 2002; Berger, 2011). When they do, they are usually not defined, and The Homeless Mind (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973) is not cited as a source. Their meanings, for the most part, are more or less clear from the contexts in which they occur, but their use seems gratuitous, and their presence is aesthetically unsatisfying.

No doubt I’m giving too much attention to a handful of essentially innocuous neologisms, but they are so ill-conceived and graceless as to diminish the credibility of Berger’s judgment that sociologists should be able to devise effective concepts peculiar to the demands of the research task at hand, and they carry with them the sound and substance of misguided scientism. It’s as if Berger were working against himself by doing a really bad job of generating new, ostensibly useful ideas.

Perhaps this is an unduly harsh judgment, and certainly, in principle, development of new concepts tailored to specific tasks may sometimes be a good idea. They do, however, seem to needlessly diminish the value of sociological concepts already in wide use. It also makes one wonder if Berger fails to appreciate his estimable facility in dealing with complex and difficult social phenomena using everyday language devoid of extraneous, quasi-technical terminology. After all, Berger himself has held that most sociology can be effectively presented in ordinary English (Berger, 1963; Berger, 2014).

In addition, in other contexts Berger has shown that he is perfectly capable of parsimoniously producing suggestively useful and linguistically attractive new concepts well suited to a particular project. For example, when working in South Africa as part of a group charged with anticipating what a post-apartheid nation might look like, he was asked to provide a conceptual framework that would guide the efforts of the disparate collection of bright and accomplished policy analysts with whom he was working (Berger, 2011).

Wisely, Berger used The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966) as his point of departure. In addition, however, he invoked the term “cognitive maps” to refer to the interests of the various politically active groups with a stake in developments in their nation (Berger, 2011).

“Cognitive maps” strikes me as just the right, self-explanatory concept to capture the conflicting, overlapping, and independent interests involved. There’s nothing awkward or mystifying about it and it serves Berger’s purpose quite well. It seems that Berger’s talent for inventing new concepts and suitably readable neologisms varies enormously from one project to another, with the fewer the better being a very good guideline.

It’s interesting to note, moreover, that Berger used the term “cognitive map” in passing, in a non-technical, conversational way in Sociology Reinterpreted (Berger & Kellner, 1981: 20 & 23). Perhaps this was a handy turn of phrase lurking in Berger’s half-forgotten, passive vocabulary just waiting for the right time to be expressed more formally (cf. Tolman, 1948). The right time came in South Africa while the feudalistic racial policies of apartheid were still in force (Berger, 1986 & 2011).

Moreover, the accessibility of his large body of work long ago persuaded me that conceptual mystification is something Berger is usually determined to avoid. Nevertheless, when Berger later discusses the meaning and genesis of some of these same novel concepts in Many Globalizations (Berger & Huntington, 2002) and Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (Berger, 2011), the ones I had found troublesome are no more clear or compelling than in The Homeless Mind (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973).

Commonsense knowledge and the reality of everyday life

As a contemporary sociologist of knowledge, Berger is primarily interested in what ordinary people know – taken-for-granted knowledge or long-established sets of instructions – rather than arcane philosophical accounts of the ideas of highly specialized scholars. Finding truth according to some presumably infallible, absolute, and fundamental standard is not part of Berger’s project. Even his work on religious faith acknowledges its organically developing character, avoiding insistence on rigidly timeless truths totally independent of their formulation in dramatically changing circumstances (Berger, 1967 & 1992).

Instead, his first concern is the reality of everyday life, or commonsense knowledge. Since we live in an intersubjective world, commonsense knowledge is the knowledge that we share with others in our everyday activities and mundane interactions.

Berger insightfully grasps the fact that this is the kind of knowledge without which society could not exist. He recognizes that the reality of everyday life is intersubjectively determined. The shared, all-purpose nature of commonsense knowledge provides an important part of an answer to a question of first importance to Durkheim, Parsons, and numerous other sociologists, namely “how is society possible” (Durkheim, 1897/1997; Simmel, 1910). Given its pervasiveness, versatility, and the ease with which it is shared, the answer for Berger is that commonsense linguistic interaction makes it so (Berger, 1963).

The one best statement of the utility and importance of commonsense knowledge that I have read is George Herbert Mead’s account of the development and nature of the generalized other in Mind, Self, and Society (Mead, 1934/1967). That Berger reveres Mead’s contribution to sociological theory is manifest throughout his work, especially The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

Whether or not Mead’s work could be used to develop a sociological psychology, one that derives its principles and perspective from a sociological understanding of everyday life, as Berger suggests, is a question that, for now and perhaps forever, remains unanswered (Mead, 1934/1967). Raising the possibility of such a development, however, is a tribute to Mead of the sort that Berger reserves for few others.

I think that an important implication of Berger’s perspective is that it is a waste of time for the sociologist, rather than the philosophical anthropologist, to struggle with deriving a definition of human nature (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Berger, 1967). If sociologists are interested in human nature as a foundation for their theorizing and substantive work, I think it’s best to construe it as contingent and context specific. We are products of the circumstances in which we live, and our nature is contextually mutable and historically distinctive. In effect, we produce ourselves and are produced as part of the dialectical social process of living with others in varied sets of circumstances that assure that our natures will be variable as well (Marx, 1844/1988; Berger, 1967). As a result, there are as many different human natures as there are distinctive cultural forms.

Berger’s emphasis on the sociology of everyday life as people actually live it is an important reason why his work, with occasional exceptions, has been consistently interesting. It also attunes us to the widespread availability of meanings without which no society could exist. It focuses on the relationship between the character of the social context in which we live and what we take to be factual and real.

Berger also makes the interesting observation that if we encounter something that seems not to fit with what we commonsensically take to be correct, we, as a matter of course and largely unself-consciously, try to reinterpret it in a way that makes it understandable, something that is consistent with our experience. This is the kind of insight that fascinated the sociologist Harold Garfinkel when he wrote his influential book Studies in Ethnomethodology, a book Berger admires for reasons he does not explain and I don’t understand (Garfinkel, 1967).

In spite of my reservations, Berger expresses admiration for Garfinkel’s early work. His approval is constrained, however, by recognition that Garfinkel’s sociology limits us to the micro-social level. By implication, I take this to mean that Berger’s research as a sociological tourist gives him access to the macro-social level, something I had not expected in an approach I had initially taken to be essentially ethnographic and decidedly informal. A moment’s reflection on his writings, however, will make clear that this assumption was erroneous. (See for example, Berger, 1967/1990, 1986, 1992 & 2011.) Berger’s ethnography, if that’s what it is, is an unusual sort that somehow gives him access to macro-social phenomena.

Berger’s sociological vocabulary and mode of expression are sufficiently distinctive such that the more of his work we have read the better we understand him. At his best, Berger speaks with a voice peculiarly his own, original, ingenious, and interpretable, but best understood in the context provided by his other work.

Berger’s use of the word “nomos” in The Social Construction of Reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), and elsewhere, for example, may be more or less readily understandable for his inveterate readers. They can compare it to “anomic” or “anomie,” ideas borrowed from Durkheim (1897/1997) that Berger uses frequently (see, for example, Berger, 1963, 1967/1990, 1986 & 2011). Those who know that anomie refers to social circumstances where meaninglessness and cultural deregulation prevail might very likely, given a suitable context, correctly infer that a nomos is a social setting where established meanings and cultural stability beneficially hold dominion. For others, however, nomos is likely to be a source of confusion and frustration, especially since it does not appear in most dictionaries.

Even Berger’s steadfast readers, however, may have trouble with his use of “nomoi” as the plural of nomos. In addition, when Berger uses “denomoized” to refer to those who have been divorced from the commonsense cultural reality of the nomos and now live anomic lives, and “nomoizing” to mean the building of “nomoi,” he may leave still more readers behind. These linguistic inventions used, to my knowledge, for the first time in The Sacred Canopy (Berger, 1967) make clear that Berger’s penchant for hard-to-interpret, strange-sounding neologisms predated The Homeless Mind (Berger, Berger & Kellner, 1973), which we will refer to shortly.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting by way of clarification that Berger uses the spelling “anomie” throughout most of his work, though as we’ll discuss below he employs the term to mean not only meaninglessness and cultural deregulation, but to cover egoism or rootlessness and lack of belonging as well (Berger, 1963). Moreover, in The Sacred Canopy he uses the spelling “anomy” (Berger, 1967). His reasons for inconsistent spellings of the same word, and tacitly attributing alternative meanings to the same concepts are not explained.

Given the contexts in which anomie and anomy are used, however, I take anomie to follow tradition and apply only to collectives – groups or social systems – where an established, inter-related body of meanings has come under assault and broken down. Anomy is sometimes used in the same way, but Berger also employs it in reference to individuals, people whose world has become culturally deregulated – living meaningless lives that are devoid of purpose (Berger, 1967).

Even brilliant scholars inevitably err

While we’re addressing issues pertaining to the utility of concepts and clarity of composition, it’s useful to call into question what at first glance may appear to be inconsistencies and ambiguities in Berger’s account of his work. Were these not all from the same volume, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (Berger, 2011), I doubt that I would have considered them worth mentioning. However, their simultaneous appearance in the same book might be taken as evidence of carelessness and an exaggerated ease of interpretation that bespeaks an accomplished scholar’s self-satisfied lack of close attention to assuring clarity in what he has recently produced. This unfortunate set of characteristics is something that Berger’s later work exhibits fairly frequently (see, for example, Berger, 1986, 2011 & 2014).

Using the phenomenological concept typification (Schutz, 1967), a set of common social assumptions and shared meanings that emerge through social interaction, Berger unequivocally asserts that sociologists’ concepts and their application must be sensitive to meanings given to social phenomena by those being studied. How a sociologist acquires this knowledge in the first place is an issue that Berger addresses at length in Reinterpreting Sociology (Berger & Kellner, 1981).

His treatment, however, has the effect of dismantling the established conceptual apparatus of sociology in favor of ad hoc constructions consistent with the understanding of the subjects of a particular research project. If consistency is not established, the concept is discarded. To do otherwise, according to Berger, is to fall victim to misguided positivism (Berger & Kellner, 1981). In effect, research is directed by meanings shared by people who are subjects of the research. In practice Berger’s procedure for concept formation reads like a process that never ends, and can be written up in only a provisional, for-the-time-being fashion, always subject to further development and clarification. This also reflects Berger’s growing interest in sociology as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Clearly, this is a labor-intensive process quite different from the way most sociology is done.

More to the point, when invoking Robert Merton’s concepts of manifest and latent function (Merton, 1949/1968), Berger repeatedly and persuasively makes the case that innumerable manifestations of the social world are not what they seem to be or what participants say they are. Thus, a primary concern of the sociologist, one that sets him apart from other social scientists, is to look beyond and beneath manifest claims to find latent truths and meanings (Berger, 1963).

These two judgments, the need for concepts to be consistent with participants’ typifications, and the priority of a sort of theoretically neutral debunking, need not be contradictory. But the two are juxtaposed so conspicuously that it’s difficult not to suspect an inconsistency (Berger, 2011). For the sake of clarity, Berger might acknowledge and reconcile them rather than leaving it for his readers to figure it out for themselves. It’s not difficult, but the need to do so may undercut a sense of certainty and completeness in Berger’s later work.

In another troublesome instance, after Berger explains what he trumpets as his “discovery of capitalism,” he makes a truly peculiar admission. In his words, “it was no longer possible for me to deal evenhandedly with capitalist and socialist modes of development” (Berger, 2011: 142).

The superiority of capitalism refers not only to enhanced productivity, but to what Berger terms “the calculus of pain” – minimizing the toll of human suffering involved in modernization – and the “calculus of meaning” – deference to the value-laden worldview of those afflicted with modernizing processes (Berger, 1986: 12). Capitalism, in most instances, proves superior to socialism, as Berger sees things.

But this is the same Berger who earlier had taken pains to explain that the substance, theory, and method of sociology enabled sociologists to divest themselves of preconceptions, preferences, and prejudices while providing genuinely objective information. To do so they used the relevance structure, or means of deciding what information is pertinent and what is not, peculiar to sociology (Berger & Kellner, 1981). (The term “relevance structure” is very roughly comparable to Kuhn’s concept “paradigm” as presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Kuhn, 1962], and Althusser and Balibar’s “problematic” as unreadably discussed in Reading Capital [Althusser & Balibar, 1970]). This is also the same Berger who in Invitation to Sociology took the positon that for “a sociologist there is one fundamental value only – that of scientific integrity” (Berger, 1963: 5).

It’s difficult to imagine that the superiority of capitalism for all times and all places had become so overwhelmingly certain that Berger, the value-neutral sociologist, no longer needed the instruments and safeguards of his own social scientific discipline to avoid misinterpretations, misconceptions and bad decisions. However, Berger did not acknowledge what appears unmistakably to be an inconsistency in his presentation. In this instance,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Background: Berger’s prose, presentation, and purpose
• 2. Institutions: Berger’s conceptual foundation
• 3. The sociological tourist
• 4. Ever the Weberian
• 5. Sociological insights into the exemplary, the everyday, and the execrable
• 6. Socially constructing modernization, modernity, and our social world
• 7. Production through science-based technology
• 8. Modes of production and cognitive styles
• 9. Provisionally taking stock: “modes of production and cognitive styles”
• 10. Modes of production and cognitive styles amplified
• 11. Reality as a social creation
• 12. Pluralism
• 13. Pluralism and capitalism
• 15. Styles of consciousness and pluralism
• 16. Reservations about pluralism
• 17. The complexity of modern consciousness
• 18. The continuing influence of Weber
• 19. Modernization augmented
• 20. Modernity and its discontents: a suitably ironic closing
• Bibliography
• Index