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Peter L. Berger citations

Peter Ludwig Berger, né le 17 mars 1929 à Vienne en Autriche et mort le 27 juin 2017 à Brookline , est un sociologue et un théologien américain d'origine autrichienne, se définissant lui-même comme appartenant à la tradition libérale protestante.

✵ 17. mars 1929 – 27. juin 2017  •  Autres noms پیتر برقر, بيتر بيرغر, Πίτερ Μπέργκερ, Питер Л. Бергер, पीटर बर्गर
Peter L. Berger photo
Peter L. Berger: 45 citations0 J'aime

Peter L. Berger: Citations en anglais

“A social world [is] a comprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner analogous to the reality of the natural world… In early phases of socialization the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations… The objective reality of institutions is not diminished if the individual does not understand their purpose or their mode of operation…He must ‘go out’ and learn about them, just as he must learn about nature.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 59-61

“One may view the individual’s everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his subjective reality… [for example] ‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ and ‘Fine, darling, have a good day at the office’ implies an entire world within which these apparently simple propositions make sense… the exchange confirms the subjective reality of this world… the great part, if not all, of everyday conversation maintains subjective reality… imagine the effect…of an exchange like this: ‘Well, it’s time for me to get to the station,’ ‘Fine, darling, don’t forget to take along your gun.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 147-163

“Modern science is an extreme step in this development, and in the secularization and sophistication of universe-maintenance.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1999: 130
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“The most important gain is that each [member of society] will be able to predict the other’s actions. Concomitantly, the interaction of both becomes predictable… Many actions are possible on a low level of attention. Each action of one is no longer a source of astonishment and potential danger to the other.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 57

“Specific procedures of universe-maintenance become necessary when the symbolic universe has become a problem. As long as this is not the case, the symbolic universe is self-maintaining, that is, self-legitimating by the sheer facticity of its objective existence in the society in question.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 123
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“Society determines how long and in what manner the individual organism shall live. This determination may be institutionally programmed in the operation of social controls, as in the institution of law. Society can maim and kill. Indeed, it is in its power over life and death that it manifests its ultimate control over the individual.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1991; p. 202
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“The encounter with bureaucracy takes place in a mode of explicit abstraction. … This fact gives rise to a contradiction. The individual expects to be treated “justly.” As we have seen, there is considerable moral investment in this expectation. The expected “just” treatment, however, is possible only if the bureaucracy operates abstractly, and that means it will treat the individual “as a number.” Thus the very “justice” of this treatment entails a depersonalization of each individual case. At least potentially, this constitutes a threat to the individual’s self-esteem and, in the extreme case, to his subjective identity. The degree to which this threat is actually felt will depend on extrinsic factors, such as the influence of culture critics who decry the “alienating” effects of bureaucratic organization. One may safely generalize here that the threat will be felt in direct proportion to the development of individualistic and personalistic values in the consciousness of the individual. Where such values are highly developed, it is likely that the intrinsic abstraction of bureaucracy will be felt as an acute irritation at best or an intolerable oppression at worst. In such cases the “duties” of the bureaucrat collide directly with the “rights” of the client—not, of course, those “rights” that are bureaucratically defined and find their correlates in the “duties” of the bureaucrat, but rather those “rights” that derive from extrabureaucratic values of personal autonomy, dignity and worth. The individual whose allegiance is given to such values is almost certainly going to resent being treated “as a number.””

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Peter L. Berger

Source: The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (1973), pp. 55-56

“At least within our own consciousness, the past is malleable and flexible, constantly changing as our recollection reinterprets and re-explains what has happened.”

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Peter L. Berger

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), p. 57 ; Cited in: Robert Benjamin Smith, ‎Peter K. Manning (1982), Qualitative methods. p. 64

“Legitimation as a process is best described as a 'second-order' objectivation of meaning. Legitimation produces new meanings that serve to integrate the meanings already attached to disparate institutional processes. The function of legitimation is to make objectively available and subjectively plausible the 'first-order' objectivations that have been institutionalized.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 92 (1991; 110)

“The social stock of knowledge differentiates reality by degrees of familiarity… my knowledge of my own occupation and its world is very rich and specific, while I have only very sketchy knowledge of the occupational worlds of others.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 43

“On this level of legitimation, the reflective integration of discrete institutional processes reaches its ultimate fulfilment. A whole world is created. All the lesser legitimating theories are viewed as special perspectives on phenomena that are aspects of this world. Institutional roles become modes of participation in a universe that transcends and includes the institutional order. In our previous example, the 'science of cousinhood' is only a part of a much wider body of theory, which, almost certainly, will contain a general theory of the cosmos and a general theory of man.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1991, 114
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“Without proposing an evolutionary scheme for such types, it is safe to say that mythology represents the most archaic form of universe-maintenance, as indeed it represents the most archaic form of legitimation generally.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 127-8
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“I shall admit frankly that, among the academic diversions available today, I consider sociology as a sort of 'royal game.”

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Peter L. Berger

Preface
Invitation to Sociology (1963)

“The second level of legitimation contains theoretical propositions in a rudimentary form. Here may be found various explanatory schemes relating sets of objective meanings. These schemes are highly pragmatic, directly related to concrete actions. Proverbs, moral maxims and wise sayings are common on this level. Here, too, belong legends and folk tales, frequently transmitted in poetic forms.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 112
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“The symbolic universe also orders history. It locates all collective events in a cohesive unity that includes past, present and future. With regard to the past, it establishes a 'memory' that is shared by all the individuals socialized within the collectivity. With regard to the future, it establishes a common frame of reference for the projection of individual actions.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 104 (1991, 120)

“Theoretical knowledge is only a small and by no means the most important part of what passed for knowledge in a society… the primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge… is the sum total of ‘what everybody knows’ about a social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths, and so forth.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 65

“The present volume is intended as a systematic, theoretical treatise in the sociology of knowledge. It is not intended, therefore, to give a historical survey of the development of this discipline, or to engage in exegesis of various figures in this or other developments in sociological theory, or even to show how a synthesis may be achieved between several of these figures and developments. Nor is there any polemic intent here. Critical comments on other theoretical positions have been introduced (not in the text, but in the Notes) only where they may serve to clarify the present argument.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 7; Lead paragraph of preface

“Two societies confronting each other with conflicting universes will both develop conceptual machineries designed to maintain their respective universes. From the point of view of intrinsic plausibility the two forms of conceptualization may seem to the outside observer to offer little choice.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 126
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“The same processes that generate consensus can be manipulated by a social group worker in a summer camp in the Adirondacks and by a Communist brainwasher in a prison camp in China.”

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Peter L. Berger

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), Chapter 1, "Sociology as an Individual Pastime."

“The sensible person reads the sociological journals mainly for the book reviews and the obituaries, and goes to sociological meetings only if he is looking for a job or has other intrigues to carry on.”

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Peter L. Berger

Source: Invitation to Sociology (1963), Chapter 1

“The social distribution of knowledge thus begins with the simple fact that I do not know everything known to my fellowmen, and vice versa, and culminates in exceedingly complex and esoteric systems of expertise. Knowledge of how the socially available stock of knowledge is distributed, at least in outline, is an important element of that same stock of knowledge.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 46

“Man is biologically predestined to construct and to inhabit a world with others. This world becomes for him the dominant and definite reality. Its limits are set by nature, but, once constructed, this world acts back upon nature. In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world the human organism itself is transformed. In this same dialectic man produces reality and thereby produces himself.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 183 (1966); (1991; p. 208)

“A sign [has the] explicit intention to serve as an index of subjective meanings… 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… Language also typifies experiences, allowing me to subsume them under broad categories in terms of which they have meaning not only to myself but also to my fellowmen.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p.35-39

“Secularization theory is a term that was used in the fifties and sixties by a number of social scientists and historians. Basically, it had a very simple proposition. It could be stated in one sentence. Modernity inevitably produces a decline of religion.”

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Peter L. Berger

Peter L. Berger, Gregor Thuswaldner. " A Conversation with Peter L. Berger "How My Views Have Changed http://thecresset.org/2014/Lent/Thuswaldner_L14.html," at thecresset.org, Lent 2014, Vol LXXVII, No. 3, pp 16-21

“The individual… is not born a member of society. He is born with a predisposition towards sociality, and he becomes a member of society. In the life of every individual, therefore, there is a temporal sequence, in the course of which he is inducted into participation in the societal dialectic. The beginning point of this process is internalization : the immediate apprehension or interpretation of an objective event as expressing meaning, that is, as a manifestation of another's subjective processes which thereby becomes subjectively meaningful to myself.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 129 (1999; 149)

“Society… directly penetrates the organism in its functioning, most importantly in respect to sexuality and nutrition. While both sexuality and nutrition are grounded in biological drives, these drives are extremely plastic in the human animal. Man is driven by his biological constitution to seek sexual release and nourishment. But his biological constitution does not tell him where he should seek sexual release and what he should eat.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

(1991, p. 202)
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

“By ‘successful socialization’ we mean the establishment of a high degree of symmetry between objective and subjective reality.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 163

“Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience.”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 25

“Habitualization carries with it the important psychological gain that choices are narrowed… the background of habitualized activity opens up a foreground for deliberation and innovation [which demand a higher level of attention].”

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Peter L. Berger livre The Social Construction of Reality

Source: The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, p. 53

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