"Content","Page"

"I N V I T A T I O N
TO
S O C I O L O G Y
A Humanistic Perspective
P E T E R L. B E R G E R
A n c h o r B o o k s
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
N EW YORK","1"
"1963","2"
"In one of the
subsequent chapters I take the position that all world
views are the result of conspiracies. The same can be
said of views concerning a scholarly discipline. In con
clusion, then, I would like to thank three individuals
who have been fellow-conspirators through many con
versations and arguments—Brigitte Berger, Hansfried
Kellner and Thomas Luckmann.","5"
"much of the
time the sociologist moves in sectors of experience that
are familiar to him and to most people in his society. He
investigates communities, institutions and activities that
one can read about every day in the newspapers. Yet
there is another excitement of discovery beckoning in his
investigations. It is not the excitement of coming upon
the totally unfamiliar, but rather the excitement of find
ing the familiar becoming transformed in its meaning","27"
"He will discover that the basic form of
organization in all denominations of any size is bu
reaucratic. The logic of administrative behavior is deter
mined by bureaucratic processes","40"
"The sociol
ogist will be driven time and again, by the very logic of
his discipline, to debunk the social systems he is study
ing.","44"
"In the Durkheimian perspective, to live in
society means to exist under the domination of society’s
logic. Very often men act by this logic without knowing
it.","46"
"two important
areas of investigation—social control and social stratifi
cation.","74"
"But economic
means of control are just as effective outside the institu
tions properly called the economy","77"
"very subtle mechanisms of control are con
stantly brought to bear upon the actual or potential
deviant These are the mechanisms of persuasion, ridi
cule, gossip and opprobrium","77"
"The social control of one’s occupational system is so
important because the job decides what one may do
in most of the rest of one’s life—which voluntary as
sociations one will be allowed to join, who will be one’s
friends, where one will be able to live. However, quite
apart from the pressures of one’s occupation, one’s other
social involvements also entail control systems, many of
them less unbending than the occupational one, but
some even more so.","82"
"If we return once more to the picture of an individual
located at the center of a set of concentric circles, each
one representing a system of social control, we can un
derstand a little better that location in society means
to locate oneself with regard to many forces that con
strain and coerce one. The individual who, thinking
consecutively of all the people he is in a position to
have to please, from the Collector of Internal Revenue
to his mother-in-law, gets the idea that all of society
sits right on top of him had better not dismiss that
idea as a momentary neurotic derangement. The sociol
ogist, at any rate, is likely to strengthen him in this
conception, no matter what other counselors may tell
him to snap out of it.","84"
"Just as all these hoary ancients have decided the
basic framework within which the passions of our ex
emplary couple will develop, so each step in their court
ship has been predefined, prefabricated—if you like,
“fixed.” It is not only that they are supposed to fall in
love and to enter into a monogamous marriage in which
she gives up her name and he his solvency, that this
love must be manufactured at all cost or the marriage
will seem insincere to all concerned, and that state and
church will watch over the menage with anxious atten
tion once it is established—all of which are fundamental
assumptions concocted centuries before the protagonists
were bom.","92"
"Neither of them has invented
this game or any part of it. They have only decided
that it is with each other, rather than with other possi
ble partners, that they will play it. Nor do they have an
awful lot of choice as to what is to happen after the
necessary ritual exchange of question and answer.
Family, friends, clergy, salesmen of jewelry and of life","92"
"insurance, florists and interior decorators ensure that the
remainder of the game will also be played by the es
tablished rules. Nor, indeed, do all these guardians of
tradition have to exert much pressure on the principal
players, since the expectations of their social world have
long ago been built into their own projections of the
future—they want precisely that which society expects
of them.","93"
"If this is so in the most intimate concerns of our ex
istence, it is easy to see that it is the same in almost any
social situation encountered in the course of a lifetime.
Most of the time the game has been “fixed” long before
we arrive on the scene.","93"
"The imperative that con
cerns us is the one that says to him, Marry! Marry!
Marry! For this imperative, unlike the other, our young
man was not bom with. It was instilled in him by so
ciety, reinforced by the countless pressures of family
lore, moral education, religion, the mass media and ad
vertising. In other words, marriage is not an instinct but
an institution. Yet the way it leads behavior into prede
termined channels is very similar to what the instincts
do where they hold sway","94"
"Now we can see what the institu
tional imperative does for him. It protects him from this
quandary. It shuts out all other options in favor of the
one that his society has predefined for him. It even bars
these other options from his consciousness. It presents
him with a formula—to desire is to love is to marry. All
that he must do now is to retrace the steps prepared for
him in this program","95"
"Society is external to ourselves. It surrounds
us, encompasses our life on all sides. We are in society,
located in specific sectors of the social system. This loca
tion predetermines and predefines almost everything we
do, from language to etiquette, from the religious be
liefs we hold to the probability that we will commit
suicide. Our wishes are not taken into consideration in
this matter of social location, and our intellectual resist
ance to what society prescribes or proscribes avails very
little at best, and frequently nothing. Society, as objec
tive and external fact, confronts us especially in the form
of coercion. Its institutions pattern our actions and even
shape our expectations.","97"
"In sum, society is the walls of our imprisonment
in history.","98"
"the individual locates himself in society
within systems of social control, and every one of these
contains an identity-generating apparatus","108"
"In the same way, society supplies our values, our
logic and the store of information (or, for that matter,
misinformation) that constitutes our “knowledge.”","123"
"A more adequate representation of social
reality now would be the puppet theater, with the cur
tain rising on the little puppets jumping about on the
ends of their invisible strings, cheerfully acting out the
little parts that have been assigned to them in the tragi
comedy to be enacted","127"
"The structures of society be
come the structures of our own consciousness. Society
does not stop at the surface of our skins. Society pene
trates us as much as it envelops us. Our bondage to
society is not so much established by conquest as by
collusion. Sometimes, indeed, we are crushed into sub
mission. Much more frequently we are entrapped by
our own social nature. The walls of our imprisonment
were there before we appeared on the scene, but they
are ever rebuilt by ourselves. We are betrayed into cap
tivity with our own cooperation.","127"
"Goffman, in his analysis of the world of “inmates” (be
it of mental hospitals or prisons or other coercive in
stitutions), has given us vivid examples of how it is
possible to “work the system,","140"
"The ingenuity human beings are capable of in cir
cumventing and subverting even the most elaborate con
trol system is a refreshing antidote to sociologistic de
pression. It is as relief from social determinism","140"
"The reasoning pursued in chapters 4 and
5 of this book could be logically fixated in a theoretical
system of sociologism (that is, a system that interprets
all of human reality consistently and exclusively in
sociological terms, recognizing no other causal factors
within its preserve and allowing for no loopholes what
ever in its causal construction). Such a system is neat,
even aesthetically pleasing. Its logic is one-dimensional
and closed within itself.","174"
"All this can readily be
admitted—and yet followed by the contention that the
inconsequence is due not to the perversity of the ob
server’s reasoning but to the paradoxical many sided
ness of life itself, that same life he is committed to ob
serve. Such openness to the immense richness of human
life makes the leaden consequence of sociologism im
possible to sustain and forces the sociologist to permit
‘holes” in the closed walls of his theoretical scheme,
openings through which other possible horizons can
be perceived.","174"
"Let us return once more to the image of the puppet
theater that our argument conjured up before. We see
the puppets dancing on their miniature stage, moving
up and down as the strings pull them around, following
the prescribed course of their various little parts. We
learn to understand the logic of this theater and we find
ourselves in its motions. We locate ourselves in society
and thus recognize our own position as we hang from its
subtle strings. For a moment we see ourselves as puppets
indeed. But then we grasp a decisive difference between
the puppet theater and our own drama. Unlike the pup
pets, we have the possibility of stopping in our move
ments, looking up and perceiving the machinery by
which we have been moved. In this act lies the first
step towards freedom. And in this same act we find the
conclusive justification of sociology as a humanistic
discipline.","182"