Social Construction of Reality ~ A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

by Peter L. Berger & Thomas Luckmann

(p.10-p17)Introduction: The Problem of the Sociology o f Knowledge

The most important American sociologist to have paid serious attention to the sociology of knowledge has been Robert Merton." His discussion of the discipline, which covers two chapters of his major work, has served as a useful introduction to the field for such American sociologists as have been interested in it. Merton constructed a paradigm for the sociology of knowledge, restating its major themes in a compressed and coherent form. This construction is interesting because it seeks to integrate the approach of the sociology of knowledge with that of structural-functional theory. Merton's own concepts of "manifest" and "latent" functions arc applied to the sphere of ideation, the distinction being made between the intended, conscious functions of ideas, and the unintended, unconscious ones. While Merton concentrated on the work of Mannheim, who was for him the sociologist of knowledge par excellence, lie stressed the significance of the Durkheim school and of the work of Pitirim Sorokin. It is interesting that Merton apparently failed to see the relevance to the sociology of knowledge of certain important developments in American social psychology, such as referencegroup theory, which he discusses in a different part of the same work.

Talcott Parsons has also commented on the sociology of knowledge." This comment, however, is limited mainly to a critique of Mannheim and does not seek an integration of the discipline within Parsons' own theoretical system. In the latter, to be sure, the "problem of the role of ideas" is analyzed at length, but in a frame of reference quite different from that of either Scheler's or Mannheim's sociology of knowledge."` We would, therefore, venture to say that neither Merton nor Parsons has gone in any decisive way beyond the sociology of knowledge as formulated by Mannheim. The same can be said of their critics. To mention only the most vocal one, C. Wright Mills dealt with the sociology of knowledge in his earlier writing, but in an expositional manner and without contributing to its theoretical development"

An interesting effort to integrate the sociology of knowledge with a neo-positivist approach to sociology in general is that of Theodor Geiger, who had a great influence on Scandinavian sociology after his emigration from Germany. Geiger returned to a narrower concept of ideology as socially distorted thought and maintained the possibility of overcoming ideology by careful adherence to scientific canons of procedure. The neo-positivist approach to ideological analysis has more recently been continued in German-speaking sociology in the work of Ernst Topitsch, who has emphasized the ideological roots of various philosophical positions 's Insofar as the sociological analysis of ideologies constitutes an important part of the sociology of knowledge as defined by Mannheim, there has been a good deal of interest in it in both European and American sociology since World War II.

Probably the most far-reaching attempt to go beyond Mannheim in the construction of a comprehensive sociology of knowledge is that of Werner Stark, another emigre continental scholar who has taught in England and the United States. Stark goes farthest in leaving behind Mannheim's focus on the problem of ideology.. The task of the sociology of knowledge is not to be the debunking or uncovering of socially produced distortions, but the systematic study of the social conditions of knowledge as such. Put simply, the central problem is the sociology of truth, not the sociology of error.- Despite his distinctive approach, Stark is probably closer to Scheler than to Mannheim in his understanding of the relationship between ideas and their social context.

Again, it is obvious that we have not tried to give an adequate historical overview of the history of the sociology of knowledge. Furthermore, we have so far ignored developments that might theoretically be relevant to the sociology of knowledge but that have not been so considered by their own protagonists. In other words, we have limited ourselves to developments that, so to speak, sailed under the banner "sociology of knowledge" (considering the theory of ideology to be a part of the latter). This has made one fact very clear. Apart from the epistemological concern of some sociologists of knowledge, the empirical focus of attention has been almost exclusively on the sphere of ideas, that is, of theoretical thought. This is also true of Stark, who subtitled his major work on the sociology of knowledge "An Essay in Aid of a Deeper Understanding of the History of Ideas." In other words, the interest of the sociology of knowledge has been on epistemological questions on the theoretical level, on questions of intellectual history oil the empirical level.

We would emphasize that we ]lave no reservations whatsoever about the validity and importance of these two sets of questions. However, we regard it as unfortunate that this particular constellation leas dominated the sociology of knowledge so far. We would argue that, as a result, the full theoretical significance of the sociology elf knowledge has been obscured.

To include epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociological knowledge in the sociology of--knowledge is somewhat like trying to push a bus in which one is riding. To be sure, the sociology of knowledge, like all empirical disciplines that accumulate evidence concerning the relativity and determination of human thought, leads toward epistemological questions concerning sociology itself as well as any other scientific body of knowledge. As we ]lave remarked before, in this the sociology of knowledge plays a part similar to history, psychology, and biology, to mention only the three most important empirical disciplines that have caused trouble for epistemology. Tic logical structure of this trouble is basically the same in all cases: How can I be sure, say, of my sociological analysis of American middle-class mores in view of the fact that the categories I use for this analysis are conditioned by historically relative forms of thought, that I myself and everything I think is determined by my genes and by my ingrown hostility to my fellowmen, and that, to cap it all, I am myself a member of the American middle class?

Far be it from us to brush aside such questions. All we would contend here is that these questions are not themselves part of the empirical discipline of sociology. They properly belong to the methodology of tile social sciences, an enterprise that belongs to philosophy and is by definition other than sociology, which is indeed an object of its inquiries. The sociology of knowledge, along with the other epistemological troublemakers among the empirical sciences, will "feed" problems to this methodological inquiry. It cannot solve these problems within its own proper frame of reference.

We therefore exclude from the sociology of knowledge the epistemological and methodological problems that bothered both of its major originators. By virtue of this exclusion we are setting ourselves apart from both Scheler's and Mannheim's conception of the discipline, and from the later sociologists of knowledge (notably those with a neo-positivist orientation) who shared the conception in this respect. Throughout the present work we have firmly bracketed any' epistemological or methodological questions about the validity of sociological analysis, in the sociology of knowledge itself or in any other area. We consider the sociology of knowledge to, be part of the empirical discipline of sociology. Our purpose here is, of course, a theoretical one. But our theorizing refers to the empirical discipline in its concrete problems, not to the philosophical investigation of the foundations of the empirical discipline. In sum, our enterprise is one of sociological theory, not of the methodology of sociology. Only in one section of our treatise (the one immediately following this introduction) do we go beyond sociological theory proper, but this is done for reasons that have little to do with epistemology, as will be explained at the time.

We must also, however, redefine the task of the sociology of knowledge on the empirical level, that is, as theory geared to the empirical discipline of sociology. As we have seen, on this level the sociology of knowledge has been concerned with intellectual history, in the sense of the history of ideas. Again, we would stress that this is, indeed, a very important focus of sociological inquiry. Furthermore, in contrast with our exclusion of the epistemological/methodological problem, we concede that this focus belongs with the sociology of knowledge. We would argue, however, that the problem of "ideas; including the special problem of ideology, constitutes only part of the larger problem of the sociology of knowledge, and not a central part at that.

The sociology o f knowledge must concern, itself with everything that passes for "knowledge" in society. As soon as one states this, one realizes that the focus on intellectual history is ill-chosen, or rather, is ill-chosen if it becomes the central focus of the sociology of knowledge. Theoretical thought, "ideas," Weltanschauungen are not that important in society. Although every society contains these phenomena, they are only part of the sum of what passes for "knowledge." Only a very limited group of people in any society engages in theorizing, in the business of "ideas," and the construction of Weltanschauungen. But everyone in society participates in its "knowledge" in one way or another. Put differently, only a few areconcerned with the theoretical interpretation of the world, but everybody lives in a world of some sort. Not only is the focus on theoretical thought" unduly restrictive for the sociology of knowledge, it is also unsatisfactory because even this part of socially available "knowledge" cannot be fully understood if it is not placed in the framework of a more general analysis of "knowledge."

To exaggerate the importance of theoretical thought in society and history is a natural failing of theorizers. It is then all the more necessary to correct this intellectualistic misapprehension: The theoretical formulations of reality, whether they be scientific or philosophical or even mythological, do not exhaust what is "real" for the members of a society. Since this is so, the sociology of knowledge must first of all concern itself with what people "know" as "reality" in their everyday, non- or pre-theoretical lives. In other words, commonsense "knowledge" rather than "ideas" must be the central focus for the sociology of knowledge. It is precisely this "knowledge" that constitutes the fabric of meanings without which no society could exist.

The sociology of knowledge, therefore, must concern itself with the social construction of reality. The analysis of the theoretical articulation of this reality will certainly continue to be a part of this concern, but not the most important part. It will be clear that, despite the exclusion of the epistemological/methodological problem, what we are suggesting here is a far-reaching redefinition of the scope of the sociology of knowledge, much wider than what-has hitherto been understood as this discipline.

The question arises as to what theoretical ingredients ought to be added to the sociology of knowledge to permit its redefinition in the above sense. We owe the fundamental insight into the necessity for this redefinition to Alfred Schutz. Throughout his work, both as philosopher and as sociologist, Schutz concentrated on the structure of the commonsense world of everyday life. Although he himself did not elaborate a sociology of knowledge, he clearly saw what this discipline would have to focus on:

All typifications of common-sense thinking are themselves integral elements of the concrete historical socio-cultural Lebens-welt within which they prevail as taken for granted and as socially approved. Their 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 o f the so-called sociology
o f knowledge.

And again:

Knowledge is socially distributed and the mechanism of this distribution can be made the subject matter of a sociological discipline. True, we have a so-called sociology of knowledge. Yet, with very few exceptions, the discipline thus misnamed has approached the problem of the social distribution of knowledge in its dependence upon social and, especially, economic conditions, or from that of the social role of the man of knowledge. Not sociologists but economists and philosophers have studied some of the many other theoretical aspects of the problem.


While we would not give the central place to the social distribution of knowledge that Schutz implies here, we agree with his criticism of "the discipline thus misnamed" and have derived from him our basic notion of the manner in which the task of the sociology of knowledge must he redefined. In the following considerations we are heavily dependent on Schutz in the prolegomena concerning the foundations of knowledge in everyday life and greatly indebted to his work in various important places of our main argument thereafter.

Our anthropological presuppositions are strongly influenced by Marx, especially his early writings, and by the anthropological implications drawn from human biology by Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen and others. Our view of the nature of social reality is greatly indebted to Durkheim and his school in French sociology, though we have modified the Durkheimian theory of society by the introduction of a dialectical perspective derived from Marx and an emphasis on the constitution of social reality through subjective meanings derived from Weber ?' Our social-psychological presuppositions, especially important for the analysis of the internalization of social reality, are greatly influenced by George Herbert Mead and some developments of his work by the so-called symbolic-interactionist school of American sociology?6 We shall indicate in thefootnotes how these various ingredients are used in our theoretical formation. We fully realize, of course, that in this use we are, not and cannot be faithful to the original intentions of these several streams of social theory themselves. But, as we have already stated, our purpose here is not exegetical, nor even synthesis for the sake of synthesis. We are fully aware that, in various places, we do violence to certain thinkers by integrating their thought into a theoretical formation that some of them might have found quite alien. We would say in justification that historical gratitude is not in itself a scientific virtue. We may cite here some remarks by Talcott Parsons (about whose theory we have serious misgivings, but whose integrative intention we fully share)

The primary aim of the study is not to determine and state in summary form what these writers said or believed about the subjects they wrote about. Nor is it to inquire directly with reference to each proposition of their "theories" whether what they have said is tenable in the light of present sociological and related knowledge . . . . It is a study in social theory, not theories. Its interest is not in the separate and discrete propositions to be found in the works of these men, but in a single body of systematic theoretical reasoning.

Our purpose, indeed, is to engage in "systematic theoretical reasoning.

It will already be evident that our redefinition of its nature and scope would move the sociology of knowledge from the periphery to the very center of sociological theory. We may assure the reader that we have no vested interest in the label "sociology -of knowledge." It is rather our understanding of sociological theory that led us to the sociology of knowledge and guided the manner in which we were to redefine its problems and tasks. We can best describe the path along which we set out by reference to two of the most famous and most influential "marching orders" for sociology.

One was given by Durkheim in The Rules of Sociological Method, the other by Weber in Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft. Durkheim tells us: "The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things."27 And Weber observes: "Both for sociology in the present sense, and for history, the object of cognition is the subjective meaning-complex of action."28 These two statements are not contradictory. Society does indeed possess objective facticity. And society is indeed built up by activity that expresses subjective meaning. And, incidentally, Durkheim knew the latter, just as Weber knew the former. It is precisely the dual character of society in terms of objective facticity and subjective, meaning that makes its "reality sui generis," to use another key term of Durkheim's. The central question for sociological theory can then be put as follows: How is it possible that subjective meanings become objective facticities? Or, in terms appropriate to the afore-mentioned theoretical positions: How is it possible that human activity (Handeln) 'should produce a world of thing (choses)? In other words, an adequate understanding of the "reality sui generis" of society requires an inquiry into the manner in which this' reality is constructed. This inquiry, we maintain, is the task of the sociology of knowledge.