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
In acute suffering the need for meaning is as strong or stronger than the need for happiness.
Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.
Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others.
He who sups with the devil had better have a long spoon. The devilry of modernity has its own magic: The [believer] who sups with it will find his spoon getting shorter and shorter--until that last supper in which he is left alone at the table, with no spoon at all and with an empty plate. The devil, one may guess, will by then have gone away to more interesting company.
The basic fault lines today are not between people with different beliefs but between people who hold these beliefs with an element of uncertainty and people who hold these beliefs with a pretense of certitude
On the one hand, man is a body, in the same way that this may be said of every other animal organism. On the other hand, man has a body. That is, man experiences himself as an entity that is not identical with his body, but that, on the contrary, has that body at its disposal. In other words, man's experience of himself always hovers in a balance between being and having a body, a balance that must be redressed again and again.
Institutions provide procedures through which human conduct is patterned, compelled to go, in grooves deemed desirable by society. And this trick is performed by making these grooves appear to the individual as the only possible ones.
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened.
He who has the bigger stick has the better chance of imposing his definitions of reality.
Unlike puppets we have the possibility of stopping in our movements, looking up and perceiving the machinery by which we have been moved. In this act lies the first steps towards freedom.
A few years ago, a priest working in a slum section of a European city was asked why he was doing it, and replied, 'So that the rumor of God may not completely disappear.
To be located in society means to be at the intersection point of specific social forces. Commonly one ignores these forces one also knows that there is not an awful lot that one can do about this.
But we don't have an example of a democratic society existing in a socialist economy - which is the only real alternative to capitalism in the modern world.
Even in a society as tightly controlled as Singapore's, the market creates certain forces which perhaps in the long run may lead to democracy