614869

research-article2015
CUS0010.1177/1749975515614869Cultural SociologySica

Article
Cultural Sociology
2016, Vol. 10(1) 3752
Social Construction as Fantasy: The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1749975515614869
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Social Construction of Reality

after 50 Years

Alan Sica
Pennsylvania State University, USA

Abstract
Ever since Berger and Luckmann published their treatment of the sociology of knowledge in 1966,
older versions of the subfield have languished, been forgotten, or misrepresented, as if The Social
Construction of Reality (SCR) eliminated the need to study its predecessors in Wissenssoziologie.
By considering Bergers subsequent statements about the book, along with remarks recently
made by Luckmann, and then returning to the text itself, this article shows that some of the main
suppositions on which SCR rests are foreign to the sociology of knowledge in its original forms,
and that a number of these premises do not seem as plausible in todays social world as they may
have in the early 1960s when their authors formulated them. The unintended scholarly results of
SCRs surprising publishing success are evaluated.

Keywords
Berger, Luckmann, contruction, sociology of knowledge, Karl Mannheim, Max Scheler,
Wienoziologie, power, knowledge, ideologies, interaction

A contrarian premise: prior to 1966, most sociology of knowledge was a sharp knife that
cut through socio-economic ideologies propagated mainly by business and government
entities. It had retained the macro-dimension bequeathed by its founders in the 18th and
19th centuries, later culminating in certain works by Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim,
Georges Gurvitch, and others. This heritage of critical attacks upon ideologically spon-
sored distortions of social life has often been recounted (e.g. by Lichtheim, 1965). The

Corresponding author:
Alan Sica, Pennsylvania State University, 203 Oswald Tower, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Email: ams10@psu.edu
38 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

goal of all such work, from Voltaire and Destutt de Tracy onward, has been to bring pow-
ermongers to heel in the interest of political and socio-economic truth. Yet after Berger
and Luckmanns book appeared, the knife was dulled, as the sociology of knowledge
steadily shrank into a small-bore branch of social psychology, with comforting emphasis
upon micro-interactions in the everyday world. As such it unintentionally aided the
apotheosis of The Self that has become a ubiquitous concern in the more prosperous soci-
eties. This marked change from the macro-political to the micro-psychological transpired
within the extra-curricular context of conservatives repudiating The Sixties, perhaps ser-
endipitously. But whatever the motives or sources of origin, the diluting impact of this
new worldview took the political-economic fire out of Wissenssoziologie, leaving in its
place a cheerful playground of the merely socially constructed.
That this viewpoint is not received wisdom concerning The Social Construction of
Reality (SCR), a book prized by legions of readers, goes without saying, and reminds one
of Benjamin Franklin and his younger admirer, Tom Paine. The wise older American, so
we are told, wrote a letter to Paine after reading the manuscript of a work in progress
called The Age of Reason which Paine had sent to him for evaluation. The letter was
perhaps sent in 1786 and might not have been written by Franklin, but is still quoted as
if it were. This alleged letter of Franklins is as easy to find online as it is difficult to date
precisely or to authenticate, because every minister searching for a Founding Fathers
legitimation of his or her trade knows it, and borrows from it during one sermon or
another. In his biography of Franklin, Walter Isaacson committed over 700 words in
small font, probing the question of the letters date and authenticity (Isaacson, 2003:
562563, note 47). His painstaking effort reveals, against the Yale editors of the com-
plete Franklin edition, that it was indeed written in 1786 and by Franklin. In 1938 Carl
Van Dorens biography of Franklin won the Pulitzer, but he did not mention the famous
letter to Paine. One wonders if Isaacsons careful sleuthing 65 years later was an advance
in scholarship. Perhaps it is a symptom of our own age of unreason, or, as Peter Berger
might call it, following Nietzsche, our age of mistrust (Berger, 2011: 94; see also Berger
and Luckmann, 1966: 7) or school of suspicion (Jaspers, 1965: 211): People whom we
cannot tolerate we try to make suspect (Nietzsche, 1984: 243, Aphorism 557).
Here, in part, is what Franklin probably wrote to his friend and admirer, Tom Paine:

Though your reasonings are subtile [sic] and may prevail with some readers, you will not
succeed so as to change the general sentiments of mankind on that subject [religious belief], and
the consequences of printing this piece will be, a great deal of odium drawn upon yourself,
mischief to you, and no benefit to others. He that spits against the wind, spits in his own face . . .
I would advise, you, therefore, not to attempt unchaining the tiger, but to burn this piece before
it is seen by any other persons; whereby you will save yourself a great deal of mortification by
the enemies it may raise against you, and perhaps a good deal of regret and repentance. If men
are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it? (emphases added)

Paine accepted Franklins shrewd opinion and postponed publishing The Age of Reason
until 1794 four years after Franklins death.
Despite Franklins wise counsel, I feel the strongest urge to spit directly into the
Bergerian Gale, the Luckmannian Cyclone the almost universal acclaim that SCR has
won for itself in English, plus its 18 translations. How many serious books titles become
Sica 39

a slogan within a few years of being published, even if often in corrupted form? How
many remain in print 50 years after publication, still selling well according to Bergers
autobiography (Berger, 2011: 89) as well as Luckmanns 2014 filmed interview
(Luckmann, 2014). The Social Construction of Reality has long since transcended the
ontological status of mere monograph, morphing into an astonishing phenomenon of
global reach and persuasiveness. Its title is as famous as are The Lonely Crowd,
Middletown, The Power Elite, Organization Man, and others from those golden days of
sociologys more robust past. And like Habits of the Heart or The Declining Significance
of Race, it has benefited from the fact that everybody knows the title while very few
interested parties, judging from typical references to the work in articles and mono-
graphs, any longer read the book with the care it received earlier in its existence.
The Social Construction of Reality is routinely identified as foundational, a classic,
a landmark, or seminal, but, as is the case with so many classics, evidence that it is
still carefully studied, even in monographs exclusively dedicated to social construction-
ism, does not readily present itself (cf. Elder-Vass, 2012: 207, 236238; Hacking, 1999:
2426, 97; Harris, 2010: 1, 3, 7, 1214, 19, 91; Lock and Strong, 2010: 29, 327, 343;
Weinberg, 2014: 2, 3, 8, 20, 51, 145). Relatedly, even in the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy article, Naturalistic Approaches to Social Construction, Berger and
Luckmanns book is not listed in a long bibliography (Mallon, 2013). Neither is it men-
tioned in a survey article on The New Sociology of Knowledge (Swidler and Arditi,
1994). This inattention to the books finer points is due in part to its intrinsic theoretical
difficulty, especially in the opening chapters where the sociology of knowledge and
Schutzs phenomenology are breathlessly surveyed. Yet, more importantly, if everybody
knows the main argument, why bother reading the mere details? After all, there are
tweets to attend to.
It is also likely the case that a book larded with dozens of foreign terms and idioms a
sign of the authors European sensibilities today seems off-putting if not downright
elitist. Neither Berger nor Luckmann were afraid to use such rhetorical devices freely
50 years ago. In addition to common foreign phrases like tout court, ex post facto, sui
generis, or mutatis mutandis, others they routinely used include ab initio, opus alienum,
opus proprium, in status nascendi, in nucleo, homo socius, a fortiori, sine ira et studio,
sub specie universi, in nuce, in actu, Hic Rhodus, hic salta, ex nihilo, realissimum,
panta rhei, de novo, and exemplum horribile. Editors today, even at the most august
scholarly publishing houses, would automatically remove such reader unfriendly
encumbrances, most especially from any manuscript for which they anticipated text-
book adoptions. In this way and many others, SCR is the work of another age, when
young scholars could strut their stuff with abandon, even in a work destined to sell
many thousands of copies, much to their surprise.
Lately it has occurred to some scholars that they might recover Das Kapital, and
when they open its volumes they find a great deal that illuminates todays sad global
economic environment. Yet what they discover there bears only a slight relation to the
more philosophical, existentialist Marx which many take to be Marxism in toto. Similarly,
I would argue, should the vast army of social constructionists return to SCR, the mother-
lode, and read it carefully, they will find that it does not support their scattered arguments
unless viewed through the distorting lens of poor hermeneutic practice. This is why
40 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

Berger, speaking for himself and Luckmann while imitating Marx, have felt constrained
to say repeatedly, We are not constructivists (Berger, 2011: 95). Luckmann recently
spent more than a few minutes of his 19-minute video interview giving his many reasons
why constructivists do not understand SCR the way he and Berger intended it to be
read, and harshly criticizes those who adopted social constructionism as their slogan
while failing to understand what the two young scholars had written. We were both very
much annoyed at this unpredicted development, said Luckmann; we never thought of
ourselves as such . . . I consider this [misappropriation of their ideas] as total nonsense
(Luckmann, 2014).
Of course part of this misattribution is the two authors own fault due to a miscalcula-
tion that came back to haunt them. As Berger himself admitted in 2009,

Perhaps the word construction . . . was unfortunate, as it suggests a creation ex nihiloas if

one said, There is nothing but our constructions. But this was not the authors intention . . .
What they proposed was that all reality was subject to socially derived interpretations. (Berger
and Zijderveld, 2009: 66)

Had they more accurately titled the book The Social Interpretation of Reality, there
would almost surely not be celebrations of its 50th birthday, despite its intrinsic value
otherwise. But these two brash young men had a plan, hatched in 1962 when Berger was
33 and Luckmann 35. They met once a week recalls Luckmann, and composed their
manifesto in January 1963, just after Berger had finished five years working at The
Hartford Seminary Foundation in Connecticut before becoming a faculty member at the
New School, his alma mater (Berger, 2011: 80). With a tight cabal of like-minded rela-
tives and colleagues in New York City (which Berger called a clique), they planned to
redirect sociology so that their sense of it based primarily on the vast unpublished work
of Alfred Schutz, of course, in addition to selected ideas of Mead, Weber, and Durkheim,
seasoned with a pinch of Marx could get them jobs and win for them the esteem they
believed could be and likely should be theirs.
In 1992 when recalling SCRs publication 25 years later, Berger remarked:

When Thomas Luckmann and I decided to write this book, in the early 1960s, our intentions
were quite modest . . . One of Schutzs unrealized projects had been to formulate a new
theoretical foundation for the sociology of knowledge in terms of his blend of phenomenology
and Weberian theory. We intended to realize this project. It was only in the course of working
on the book that we discovered, to our own surprise, that the project developed a more ambitious
scope. (Pfadenhauer, 2013: 11)

But 19 years later in his autobiography, he retracted these modest intentions, and admit-
ted having been coy when asked about the two authors ambitions: I did not own up to
our imperial fantasies (Berger, 2011: 92). He bluntly explains how their youthful hopes
took shape:

As the sociology of knowledge project morphed into a much more ambitious theoretical
enterprise, and as the fantasies of our little clique took on imperial scope, the book that was to
be the end product of the project became a kind of manifesto . . . The subtitle, A Treatise in the
Sica 41

Sociology of Knowledge, nicely reflected an ambivalence in the minds of Thomas Luckmann

and myself. Describing the topic simply in terms of the sociology of knowledge was an
understatementthe book had turned into something much more ambitious. Yet the word
treatise is pretentious, worthy of cofounders of an imperial undertaking. Well, the empire never
happened. (Berger, 2011: 88, original emphasis).

Put simply, Berger, Luckmann, and their Central European confederates felt excluded
from American sociology, knew they had a theoretical perspective more sophisticated
than much of what passed for theory in the US at that time, and wanted to be invited to
the expanding party. They did not want forever to personify Simmels marginal man.
Once again, Berger explains their motivation clearly, this time in relation to a book he
wrote in three weeks during the same time he and Luckmann were meeting weekly to
write SCR:

I wanted out of Hartford, not because I was unhappy there but because (perhaps misguidedly)
I wanted to be in a proper Sociology Department, with graduate students in sociology. Thus
Invitation to Sociology had a subtext: a plea to fellow sociologists: Please invite me! (Berger,
2011: 76)

They no longer wished to be on the outside looking in upon the thriving sociological
drama, when, it should be remembered, sociology was fast becoming the most popular
undergraduate major in the United States.
Berger and Luckmann expressed phenomenal youthful chutzpah (Bergers own word)
by planning a series of articles and books that would transform sociology, snatching it
away from the Parsons/Merton clan of structural-functionalists, by friendly implication
allying itself with the symbolic interactionists whose homes were at Chicago, Iowa, and
Berkeley, and incidentally slaying the quantitative dragon that lurked at Wisconsin, Ohio
State, and other large, galumphing sites of quantophrenia, to use Pitirim Sorokins term
of abuse (Sorokin, cited in Paquet, 2009). And to do that, they needed a catchy title, so
they found one. As they have both said many times since, the book caught on and helped
shape the prevailing zeitgeist, while also reflecting it. But within a few years, as the
winds of fashion blew stronger from France than from Germany, their admiring audi-
ence, so it now seems, stopped reading the book itself, and instead simply hijacked its
title. They put it to their own peculiarly solipsistic uses, few of which Berger or Luckmann
found appealing. As Berger later observed, it was not unpleasant to bask in the favor of
the zeitgeist, then recalled a favorite apothegm by Dean Inge: He who marries the spirit
of the age soon finds himself a widower (Berger, 2011: 75). They have agreed since that,
should they rewrite the book, they would change little, even if their real authorial inten-
tions have been lost on many readers.
Not only was the main title something of a scam, but so too was the haughty subtitle
(A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge), which a recent sympathetic study called a
marketing ploy (Pfadenhauer, 2013: 128), aimed mostly at scholars in Germany, where
Luckmann hoped to return. The two authors made much in their book of Arnold Gehlens
and Helmuth Plessners ideas neither of whom were well known in the States and as
Plessner observed in the German edition, while many German sociologists would be
irritated by the word construction in the title, they would be appeased by the subtitle,
42 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

because the sociology of knowledge is an old favorite of German readers (Pfadenhauer,

2013: 128). As an aside I can hazard a guess as to why that is the case. Crafty German
intellectuals adore the word sogenannt, meaning so-called. They live to demystify,
ironize, debunk, and satirize whatever beliefs someone proposes with which they disa-
gree often those originating in France but not in a violent or overtly rude way, espe-
cially since the Second World War. They prefer to snicker rather than guffaw. For
example, Alfred Schutz, Berger and Luckmanns teacher and inspiration, wrote:

Structure determines among other things the social distribution of knowledge and its relativity
and relevance to the concrete social environment of a concrete group in a concrete historical
situation. Here are the legitimate problems of relativism, historicism, and the so-called
sociology of knowledge. (Schutz, 1962: 149)

But we will not pursue that notion here, other than to note that Berger and Luckmann were
not entirely earnest, were in fact rather calculating, in their choice of title and subtitle.
So, if the authors do not support postmodernist, egocentric denials of social structure
that constitute so many constructivist positions some sort of auto-poetic exercise out
of thin air . . . I consider social constructivism to be essentially metaphysical in the pejo-
rative sense of the word, as Luckmann (2014) recently put it in a video interview and
if my approach to their ideas concerns social construction as fantasy, in what way
exactly do I spit into the enduring headwinds first created by Berger and Luckmann, then
taken up by throngs of their misinterpreting admirers? To answer this thoroughly one
would carefully have to turn back to the book itself, freeing it from a half-century of
commentary and interpretative accretions. Only then could one attempt to perfect just the
sort of tedious hermeneutics for which Berger and Luckmann had little patience, as evi-
denced by the tone and structure of the book itself. Only through this timeworn method
would I be able to substantiate my long-held belief that SCR undercut a promising trajec-
tory of what was at that time still a young mode of sociological inquiry, and which could
have taken another and possibly more fruitful path, had it not been for their surprising
intervention. My response to SCR going back decades is that the first wave of
Wissenssoziologie was torpedoed and heavily damaged by Berger and Luckmann, whose
point of view and vocabulary its champions eagerly, if selectively, adopted. Such follow-
ers seemed happy to be free of the heavy scholarly and political/historical baggage that
accompanied the opening salvos in the 1920s by Mannheim, Scheler, Lukcs, or
Grunwald. There being insufficient space here for such a thorough examination, what
follows must serve as a prolegomenon to such an analysis.
My data preliminary to discussing selected aspects of the book are these: 1) a careful
rereading of the text itself after a hiatus of over 35 years, when I studied it in order to
teach the book; 2) Bill Moyers 28-minute interview with Peter Berger in 1989 on video-
tape, and several YouTube performances by Berger and one by Luckmann; 3) Bergers
private letters to and from Irving Louis Horowitz held in the Horowitz Archive in the
Penn State Library, of which there are over 200 exchanged between 1965 and 1999; 4)
study of all eight reviews the book received that I could find (Gustafson, 1968; Donald
W. Light Jr., 1967; Ivan H. Light, 1969; Macquet, 1968; Martin, 1968; Rose, 1967;
Simpson, 1967; Wagner, 1967). Neither The American Journal of Sociology nor Social
Sica 43

Forces, two of the three top outlets at the time for sociological book reviews, published
treatments of SCR, which may account for Luckmanns mistaken impression that the
book was not much reviewed when it first appeared; 5) Bergers 2011 autobiography, and
also Michaela Pfadenhauers recently published The New Sociology of Knowledge: The
Life and Work of Peter L. Berger; 6) Schutzs works; 7) Mannheims and Schelers
works, most of which I first read carefully many years ago; and 8) books and articles that
begin with The Social Construction of Whatever, most notably Ian Hackings The
Social Construction of What? (1999) and including Asia Friedmans Blind to Sameness:
Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (2013). This is
not necessarily a comprehensive basis for a hermeneutically keen assessment of SCR, but
one does ones best within limits.
At this point it is worth recalling that Bergers autobiography carries the subtitle How
To Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore, and, perhaps even more self-revelatory,
the opening chapter of the same book is titled Balzac on Twelfth Street. During a par-
ticularly fertile period of what he calls bibliorrhea (Berger, 2011: 75), Berger composed
his first novel, using the pseudonym Felix Bastian (p. 85). In 1964 he became bored
while summering on Lake Maggiore in a beautiful southern canton of Switzerland, and
used fiction-writing to dilute his tedium. He had long before been accused by a French
professor of being more a littrateur than a social scientist (Berger, 2011: 84), and his
novel-writing seemed to validate that diagnosis. The next summer he wrote a second
novel, but it was not published until 10 years later by a small firm specializing in reli-
gious books, and was likely accepted because of the fame of his sociology titles from the
1960s rather than for its literary merit (Berger, 2011: 87). Yet he surely did not throw
himself into the role of novelist with complete abandon. I had realized by now how
marginal I was to the mainstream of American sociology, and, after all, I was nursing
dreams of building an empire with our new approach to sociological theory (Berger,
2011: 85) as announced in SCR. This accounts for his use of a pseudonym for his first
novel, for fear of being tagged a mere littrateur by the fiercely scientistic people who
bore the title American sociologist. Berger and Luckmann were both acutely aware of
their Eurocentric mode of scholarship, which became both their strength and their handi-
cap, professionally speaking. It did not help that SCRs endnotes were larded with a
preponderance of references to untranslated German and French writings.
One senses from SCR that Berger, perhaps more than Luckmann, dreaded becoming
a scholarly parody of a real person, like George Eliots pretentious Casaubon, so in love
with his own hyper-specialized knowledge that the real world Schutzs paramount
reality disappears from his blinkered view. Perhaps by spending two years in uniform
at Fort Benning, Georgia, listening patiently to accounts of soldiers psychological cri-
ses, and trying to resolve them by means of the sociology he had learned at the New
School, Berger could not become the otherworldly Luftmensch personified in Karl
Mannheim, Max Scheler, and others who founded Wissenssoziologie, but instead evolved
into a man of the people. He feared being seen as a Europeanized, self-absorbed book-
worm. In another context, while lecturing in Iran 10 years later, he observed that intel-
lectuals are typically unaware of the stirrings in the bazaars of the unenlightened
(Berger, 2011: 141), and this brand of shortsightedness he always strived to avoid. As for
Luckmann, before repatriating to Germany he taught for a while in the US at Hobart
44 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

College; the sort of experience that forces even the most elevated scholarly mind to come
to terms with practical mundanity.
Even a casual reader of SCR will notice a few items of compositional interest man-
nerisms and practices that might be considered pre-substantive. To notice these rhetori-
cal tics requires rereading the book with as much an eye for mere style as for so-called
theory, to shift emphasis from one to the other, admitting that for its authors, style mat-
tered. First, the Introduction (pp. 118), which the authors claim readers could reason-
ably skip, is lifted from an earlier article that raced through the history of Wissenssoziologie
from Marx forward with dizzying speed and superficiality. It may have impressed
American readers at the time because of its 28 endnotes citing 52 authoritative scholars,
many in French and German. Or they may have taken the authors advice, and skipped
reading it.
This section of SCR puts youthful effrontery on full display. Within this slight incur-
sion into a difficult subject, Berger and Luckmann gallop through huge fields of thought
on their determined way to a polemically anchored destination. They claim not to be
argumentatively inspired, but the pretended neutrality of their prose belies that posture.
Marxs pivotal ideas about Unterbau and berbau they damn with faint praise, eventu-
ally arguing that even his most gifted expositor, Gyrgy Lukcs, was too determinist
when connecting a protagonists social position with the contents of his/her conscious-
ness and speech (pp. 67). In a remarkable sleight of hand, they claim that Schelers,
Mannheims, and Grnwalds early versions of the sociology of knowledge or gnosio-
sociology as renamed by Gerard de Gr are defective because they dwell only on high
cultural expression and politically sophisticated ideologies, apparently believing that
everyday life is unfit for analysis. Such a claim handily makes room for the Schutzian
approach his two able students were proselytizing. Yet study of Schelers phenomeno-
logically inspired work on sympathy, resentment, the humanly eternal, and so on, or
Mannheims many essays on freedom, conservatism, the democratization of culture,
mass education, inter alia, give the lie to this accusation. Yes, of course, they were
Teutonic mandarins of a high order, but this did not automatically mean they were blind
to the everyday in their analyses.
Because Berger and Luckmann cite many pertinent works by title, even if with sparse
specific quotations or page numbers, they appear to have surveyed the field judiciously
and found it wanting. (It is likely they borrowed significantly from their teachers at the
New School, Carl Mayer and Albert Salomon, and their peers, Kurt Wolff and Friedrich
Tenbruck; p. vii.) They cite none of Schelers or Mannheims many works except by title,
and were therefore unable to prove the strength of their complaints in the conventional
way. Readers in the US, unable to read the originals or exhausted by the translations,
might well have believed they were being gently led out of the perdition of European
Wissenssoziologie and into the more sensible and accessible zone of social
constructionism.
What a relief that must have been for those who had found Mannheims work, not to
mention Schelers, difficult to digest. And yet consider one contrary quotation among
hundreds from Mannheims most famous book, apparently contradicting Berger and
Luckmanns most general complaint, that the sociology of knowledge concerned itself
only with high culture and politics. From Mannheims Ideology and Utopia:
Sica 45

This debunking tendency in the thought of our time has become very marked. [Note 8: Carl
Schmitt analyzed this characteristic contemporary manner of thought very well when he said
that we are in continual fear of being misled. Consequently we are perpetually on guard against
disguises, sublimations, and refractions . . .] And even though in wide circles this trait [the
debunking tendency] is considered undignified and disrespectful (and indeed insofar as
debunking is an end in itself, the criticism is justified), this intellectual position is forced upon
us in an era of transition like our own, which finds it necessary to break with many antiquated
traditions and forms. (Mannheim, 1936: 64)

This could not be clearer or more down to earth, not to mention as relevant now as then,
if not more so. In fact, it summarizes precisely what Erving Goffman proposed about 25
years later, and of which Berger and Luckmann made approving use. It is a fools errand
to dismiss Scheler and Mannheim as mandarins without awareness of everyday dialogue.
In fact Mannheims wife, Julia Mannheim-Lang, was a practicing psychoanalyst, and he
thanks her for informing his own writing; for keeping it grounded.
There are other surface features of SCR which draw ones attention during a close
reading. Every social theorist falls in love with certain terms, either of their own inven-
tion, or as redefined to suit their project, and in this, Berger and Luckmann were no
exception. Their prose did indeed flow nicely, except when it overstretched for pedan-
tic effect, but there were certain ordinary words without which their argument would
have become much weaker, and which became, perhaps unconsciously, their battle
flags. Let us begin with the innocuous word available. Of a dozen uses that I noted
between pages 32 and 178, here is an early instance: The typifications of habitualized
actions that constitute institutions are always shared ones. They are available to all the
members of the particular social group in question (p. 54, original emphasis). Or
from later in the book: There is always more objective reality available than is actu-
ally internalized in any individual consciousness, simply because the contents of
socialization are determined by the social distribution of knowledge (p. 134). Aside
from sounding much like Marx, if lightened in complexion, this use of available
sounds almost like a magical incantation. One wonders what it means objective real-
ity being available in too large a form to saturate the socialization process, perhaps?
In a section on roles (pp. 7279), an orgy of availables appears without warning or
precedent (e.g. a generally available pattern in a matrilocal society, socially availa-
ble typifications, objectively available typifications, objectively available world,
and so on).
The Schutzian point Berger and Luckmann wish to emphasize is that what a person
does in the social world, especially through language and patterned behavior, is there to
be inspected, considered, appropriated perhaps, rejected at times, and otherwise influ-
enced by others reciprocally in face-to-face situations. Hence they claim that such typi-
fications are available to all members of small groups. Were Professor Berger to attend
a convivial celebration of SCR today, he would indeed be available to those around
him, up to a point; the confreres could question him at will, and he would be obliged to
answer or politely turn aside these inquiries. But immediately after this event, he would
no longer be available to anyone in attendance unless he chose to be. When Peter Berger
visited the Vatican in 1969 and met Pope Paul VI, availability was a very short-term
mutual experience, likely unique in a given biography.
46 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

Marx, Mannheim, and others in the rejected Wissenssoziologie tradition, well under-
stood and analyzed the likely lack of genuine reciprocity between persons of unequal
rank; a reciprocity that Berger and Luckmann assume routinely exists, and which they
dignify with the repeated term dialectical. The earlier thinkers understood that, put in
todays terms, the Walmart associate may well be available to anyone who asks for
help in the store, and is duty-bound to march the customer to the requested zone of
purchase. But the customer is not in any sense available to the associate except to boss
her around, and the heirs to the Walmart empire fly so high above the earths surface in
terms of wealth and status that they are unavailable to anyone but God. Or, more impor-
tantly, to Warren Buffett. This may seem like a trivial point, but it captures a thorough-
going defect of the books tone, even as its authors try to escape micro-worlds and enter
the macro.
In fact, Berger himself charmingly illuminates this tone when he refers to a distinc-
tively Viennese principle. I call it the coffee-house principle: If you collect the right
people and have them sit together long enough, they are bound to come up with some-
thing interesting (Berger, 2011: 125). Berger invokes this imagery many times through-
out his autobiography in explicit terms, and with obvious fondness, even nostalgia, for
those mainly historical moments when intellectuals could gather in a relaxed setting and
argue about whatever concerned them at the moment, for example:

There still [fall, 1963] were evening classes, lively and intellectually stimulating students, and
the ambience of Greenwich Village with the cafes and bistros to which one could go after class.
All in all, it was quite intoxicating after the Protestant sedateness I had left behind in Hartford.
(Berger, 2011: 80)

Much later in his professional life he referred to one coffee house morphing into the next
coffee house . . . an alliance of coffee-house habitus . . . coffee houses piled upon coffee
houses! (Berger, 2011: 193194). Towards the end of his autobiography, Berger ponders
his repeated return to this particular trope:

Perhaps I have overused the coffee house as a metaphor for a methodological habitus. It may
simply be a reflection of a romantic image derived from my Viennese origins . . . The attitude
of open-mindedness, of not taking oneself too seriously, of appreciating style and wit as
enhancing understanding. Most important, it is a metaphor for a very important insightthat
there are few pleasures in life to equal that of sustained conversation with intelligent, articulate
people in a congenial environment . . . It helps if the conversation is fueled by coffee and is
enveloped in pungent tobacco smoke. (Berger, 2011: 206)

Ever since Boswells Johnson, the 18th-century salon or coffee house has often been
portrayed as the origin of what we now call, thanks to Habermas, the public sphere,
and as such is almost invariably praised for its nurturing nature when it comes to schol-
arly or literary creativity. Needless to say, there is nothing in the least wrong with long-
ing for such a situation. Hemingways paean to Paris in the 1920s, the so-called
moveable feast, has long set the tone of veneration such settings enjoy, at least in fond
retrospect. My surly objection revolves around what it presumes about social life when
generalized, and what it omits in particular any analytic concern for what Marx and
Sica 47

his era called the political-economy. One might argue that Berger later wrote about
economics at some length, especially in Pyramids of Sacrifice and his enthusiastic
endorsement in The Capitalist Revolution. But in SCR, the real foundation Marx and
others have defined as the keystone to sociological understanding is almost entirely
absent. The detailed SCR index lists three minor mentions of economic relations,
whereas religion receives 14 and types another 11. Polite interlocutors in the coffee
house do not, perhaps, bring up such tawdry matters. (Oddly enough, though, Marx
himself is mentioned four times in the text proper, with most of his citations relegated
to the endnotes; the same for Durkheim.)
This coffee house attitude, voiced 50 years after he and Luckmann drafted their
manifesto for changing sociology, is evident throughout SCR, and most apparent when-
ever it probes micro-interactions. This is perhaps one of my strongest objections to the
books subtitle A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge for what one gets is not in
fact a sociology of knowledge, but a sociology of schmoozing, of good-natured, civi-
lized, interactionally balanced, literate, well-intentioned, and salutary coffee house salon
chatting. It is hard to imagine such a book being composed, for instance, by Herbert
Blumer, another very astute student of interaction. He stood 6 foot, 1 inch, 200 lbs, and
played guard and end in professional football for the Chicago Cardinals between 1925
and 1933, while at the same time earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He
became George Herbert Meads most influential student, and founded the Berkeley soci-
ology department. Much of his sociology grew out of labor settings and other real-
world venues. He would likely have found the Viennese coffee shop imagery intriguing
but unconvincing when applied to the rough and tumble socio-economic world of the
1930s, about which he provided shrewd analyses. Nor would Norman Mailer, pugilistic
novelist, have accepted the description of social life detailed in SCR. Nor would Jane
Goodall, standing over the remains of her beloved chimps, slaughtered by humans for
trivial reasons. Surely Weber, despite the putative importance his ideas held for Berger
and Luckmann, and given his keen sense of military and political history, would have
found their interactional worldview perplexing. And need one even mention the dis-
turbed social world regularly offered up in the works of Theodor Adorno and Max
Horkheimer (e.g. Dialectic of Enlightenment or Minima Moralia), or of their colleague,
Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man)?
Violence, physical threats to safety, warmongering, economic and environmental
destruction, genuine class conflict, and so many other obtrusive and ubiquitous ingredi-
ents in contemporary life precisely those which in 1936 had so worried Mannheim do
not share the limelight in SCR when compared with lots of interactional availability:
one attentive, perceptive person speaking with another. If Berger and Luckmann wanted,
consciously or otherwise, to bury their early years enduring the terror that consumed
Europe during the 1930s, this is understandable. Yet substituting for the realism of earlier
works in Wissenssoziologie an interactional utopia sprung in part from Viennese novels
(the estimable Heimito von Doderer is quoted; Berger, 2011: 112), or perhaps TVs sac-
charine family shows of the 1950s, did nothing to advance what the sociology of knowl-
edge can accomplish when given sufficient scope. It is not that SCR is uninteresting, or
that the SchutzianMeadian model of interaction is inauthentic or unuseful. Rather, when
viewed via a Mannheimian lens, the book seems irresponsibly apolitical and free of
48 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

sufficient political-economic insight, and thus, without really aiming to be, decidedly
conservative when set beside its forbears in the sociology of knowledge. Given Bergers
later reputation as a self-described, paid spy for Big Tobacco against the anti-smoking
lobby (Berger, 2011: 171), as an outspoken apologist for the benefits capitalism brings to
its select participants, as an opponent of trendy Leftist campus causes during the 1970s
and 1980s such latent conservatism makes sense, and anticipates his later fondness for
the so-called neo-conservatives of the 1980s.
We began this pre-substantive ramble through SCR by commenting on available as
a term of art that carries a heavy load throughout the argument. There are other words
which also become load-bearing beams in the BergerLuckmann brownstone. (Luckmann
says in his recent interview [2014] that he would have preferred the term building to
construction, hence my adoption of his metaphor here.) Another is massive and mas-
sivity featured between pages 30 and 164, as in the passage, the massive evidence of
the others subjectivity, and, in the same paragraph, the massively real presence of his
subjectivity (p. 30). Later in the book we learn that Reality takes on massive propor-
tions when entire social strata become its carriers (p. 127), or The world of childhood
is massively and indubitably real (p. 136). And in a sentence that displays a number of
stylistic tropes common within the BergerLuckmann social universe:

But even when the world of everyday life retains its massive and taken-for-granted reality in actu,
it is threatened by the marginal situations of human experience that cannot be completely bracketed
in everyday activity. There is always the haunting presence of metamorphoses . . . (p. 147)

The so-called threat to equilibrium and biographical coherence posed by marginal

events, or social arrangements, or corruptions of character, obviously disturbed Berger
and Luckmann, as well they might, considering the political circumstances of their child-
hoods. And childhood is given a great deal of attention in SCR; far more than in any other
work in the sociology of knowledge to that point.
One wonders if the authors subconsciously slighted macro and political-economic
analysis in favor of explaining intergenerational transmission of cultural traits, and the
hallowed taken-for-grantedness about which they wrote at such length. Put crudely
another frequent expression in the book did they give up on the Big Story in order to
wrap themselves in the soft cloak of the social pianissimo, that precious social intimacy
which Weber also found to be a relief from overwhelming rationalization processes?
Recall one of Webers most famous passages, from the conclusion to a rare speech he
gave to war-weary young scholars in November 1917, and which clearly spoke volumes
to Berger and Luckmann:

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all,
by the disenchantment of the world. Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have
retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the
brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our great art is
intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and
intimate circles, in personal human situations in pianissimo, that something is pulsating that
corresponds to the prophetic pneuma, which in former times swept through the great
communities like a firebrand, welding them together. (Weber, 1946: 155)
Sica 49

Yet Weber did not stop here. He accepted this desiccated condition of European life, and
then compared it hopefully with all the social structures he could identify across time and
place, hunting soberly for an escape hatch from the iron cage.

To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather
return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The
arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. (Weber, 1946: 155)

Is it accidental that both Berger and Luckmann have written so much about religiosity,
about the failure of secularization to wipe out religious sentiment? Here they and Weber
part company.
Finally, in terms of specially freighted words, there is concrete. As in the Schutz
passage quoted above (Schutz, 1962: 149), where concrete appears thrice in one sen-
tence, this is a metaphorical image that means a great deal, particularly among German
theorists. Marx used the word often, and others have followed. In fact, it appears in
Hegel, too. There is nothing wrong, of course, with emphasizing that certain human
relationships are durable, strong, reliable, and readily available, and thus are concrete
by nature. The problem comes when theorists reify the adjective and begin to think that
by saying relationships are concrete, a measure of permanence is bequeathed to human
interactions which overstates their durability and camouflages the fleeting, unstable, and
asymmetric qualities of interaction. It is based on spoken language, on gestures, manner-
isms, clothing and other external accoutrements too subtle to recount, but all of which are
also ephemeral in an ontological sense. When a human dies, survivors say in wonder-
ment, one minute they were there, and the next, gone! So, too, spoken interactions. We
would like to capture such moments and bottle them for later use the moment when a
marriage proposal was accepted, when a doctorate was granted, when cancer was beaten
but they resist any kind of real memorialization. By relying from page 36 to page 138,
here and again, on images of the concrete in social life, Berger and Luckmann dutifully
follow Schutzs lead. But in so doing they indulge in a comforting fantasy that seems to
become ever more elusive as the world grows in population, complexity, variety, and
hyper-communication. If humans truly operated in a concrete fashion in concrete rela-
tionships of concrete trust and predictability, the Geneva Convention would work, slav-
ery would disappear, and the thriving business of war would diminish.
This prolegomenon to a full-scale hermeneuticization of SCR ends with a bit of
attention to the concept of fantasy in my title. Alfred Schutz, in Volume One of his
Collected Papers, within the famous essay On Multiple Realities, introduced a subsec-
tion which he named The Various Worlds of Phantasms (Schutz, 1962: 234239). The
Social Construction of Reality draws throughout both silently and explicitly on Schutz,
yet this tiny part of his oeuvre does not seem to have played a large role in the authors
thinking. (Quite parenthetically, Schutzs name in early Berger articles appears with an
umlaut over the u, but later on does not. The case of the vanishing umlaut may have
phenomenological significance, or perhaps merely illustrates the attempted
Americanization of a starkly European author; or it may have had more to do with
Schutzs importexport day job than his evening courses at the New School.) In a pas-
sage dedicated to disentangling the meaning of marginal situations as they accost
50 Cultural Sociology 10(1)

character and personality, Berger and Luckmann write: Such situations are experienced
in dreams and fantasies as provinces of meaning detached from everyday life, and
endowed with a peculiar reality of their own (p. 96). As they near the end of their disqui-
sition, they then note that:

The unsuccessfully socialized individual himself is socially predefined as a profiled type the
cripple, the bastard, the idiot, and so on. Consequently, whatever contrary self-identifications
may at times arise in his own consciousness lack any plausibility structure that would transform
them into something more than ephemeral fantasies. (pp. 165166)

A few pages later we read, The subjectively chosen identity becomes a fantasy identity,
objectified within the individuals consciousness as his real self (p. 171). Finally, and
closer to Schutzs concerns, Berger and Luckmann write that Dreams can be more easily
quarantined within consciousness as nonsense to be shrugged aside or as mental aber-
rations to be silently repented; they retain the character of phantasms vis vis the reality
of everyday life (p. 147).
In a dense six-page meditation on phantasms and phantasizing, Schutz brings Husserl
into play, and transfers the latters philosophical analysis about the topic into a more
social-psychological vein, partly by also calling on William James (Schutz, 1962: 234
240). Though hard to summarize fairly, a few remarks stand out, for example:

Imagining itself is, however, necessarily inefficient and stays under all circumstances outside
the hierarchies of plans and purposes valid within the world of working. The imagining self
does not transform the outer world. (p. 236)

Not surprisingly, this coincides with Berger and Luckmanns appraisal of fantasy as a
component of lived experience. Schutz pushes this viewpoint further:

In my imagery I may fancy myself in any role I wish to assume. But doing so I have no doubt
that the imagined self is merely a part of my total personality, one possible role I may take, a
Me, existing only by my grace. (p. 239)

So far, nothing special has occurred, and then, in the concluding paragraph, Schutz dis-
plays a penetrating sense of phantasms that is lacking in most of SCR, to wit:

Imagining can be lonely or social and then take place in We-relation as well as in all of its
derivations and modifications . . . The freedom of discretion of the imagining self is here a very
large one. It is even possible that the phantasm may include an imagined cooperation of an
imagined fellow-man to such an extent that the latters imagined reactions may corroborate or
annihilate my own phantasms. (p. 240)

When one studies SCR, this phrase of Berger and Luckmanns adored teacher speaks
very loudly indeed: imagined cooperation of an imagined fellow-man. It fairly leaps off
the page. Perhaps because he was a businessman in New York City, he understood phan-
tasmagorics in a way that his earnest students did not. Whatever the cause, Schutz saw
that wishing for a society constituted by characters who would have been at home in
Sica 51

Samuel Johnsons coffee shop, Boswell in the corner furiously noting every word, does
not make it so.
In an unpublished letter from Peter Berger to Irving Louis Horowitz dated 21 August
1999, Berger apologizes for being unable to attend the latters 70th birthday party at the
Princeton Club in September. Telling Horowitz that his own 70th birthday has been a
good thing, he explains that

I now feel fully legitimated in saying anything that comes to my mind and be as offensive as I
want. Perhaps we can collaborate in a worthwhile project of becoming Impossible Old Men!
And, of course, I love that we can continue to collaborate [in] the various efforts to debunk the
assorted intellectual imbecilities of our time. (Horowitz, 1999)

It is good to know from this document that the ever-humorous Berger had learned in the
second half of his three score and ten years that the taken-for-granted paramount reality
of everyday life can be as much given over to imbecilities as to the sensible give-and-
take he and Luckmann hungered for in the early 1960s, when everybody was young and
anything was possible.

Note
1. Benjamin Franklins letter to Thomas Payne can be found at: http://www.wallbuilders.com/
libissuesarticles.asp?id=58 (accessed 21 October 2015).

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Author biography
Alan Sica is Professor of Sociology and founding director of the Social Thought Program at
Pennsylvania State University, immediate past editor of the ASA journal, Contemporary Sociology,
and author or editor of a number of books concerning social theory and Max Weber, about whom
he has been writing for 40 years.