Peter L. Berger
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Bergeris an Austrian-born American sociologist known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theoretical contributions to sociological theory. He is best known for his book, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, 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. The book was...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth17 March 1929
CountryAustria
Peter L. Berger quotes about
The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance
If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes
Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization
In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.
In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility.
Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man.
In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state
An economy oriented toward production for market exchange provides the optimal conditions for long-lasting and ever-expanding productive capacity based on modern technology.
East Asia confirms the superior capacity of industrial capitalism in raising the material standard of living of large masses of people.
Language is capable of becoming the objective repository of vast accumulations of meaning and experience, which it can then preserve in time and transmit to following generations.
The human organism is thus still developing biologically while already standing in a relationship to its environmont. In other words, the process of becoming man takes place in an interrelationship with an environment. (...) From the moment of birth, man's organismic development, and indeed a large part of his biological being as such, are subjected to continuing socially determined interference.
Some people seem to gravitate from one fundamentalism to another, from some kind of secular fundamentalism into a religious fundamentalism or the other way around, which is not very helpful.
If you are good for nothing else, you can still serve as a bad example.