Peter L. Berger
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Bergeris an Austrian-born American sociologist known for his work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of religion, study of modernization, and theoretical contributions to sociological theory. He is best known for his book, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, which is considered one of the most influential texts in the sociology of knowledge, and played a central role in the development of social constructionism. The book was...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth17 March 1929
CountryAustria
Peter L. Berger quotes about
So I think one can say on empirical grounds - not because of some philosophical principle - that you can't have democracy unless you have a market economy.
If the cultural elite has its way, the U.S. will be much more like Europe
It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term
One can't understand the Christian Right and similar movements unless one sees them as reactive - they're reacting to what they call secular humanism
The negative side to globalization is that it wipes out entire economic systems and in doing so wipes out the accompanying culture
When certain branches of the economy become obsolete, as in the case of the steel industry, not only do jobs disappear, which is obviously a terrible social hardship, but certain cultures also disappear.
The problem with liberal Protestantism in America is not that it has not been orthodox enough, but that it has lost a lot of religious substance
If you say simply that pressures toward democracy are created by the market, I would say yes
Some people think that as the Chinese economy becomes more and more capitalistic it will inevitably become more democratic
I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization
In science, as in love, a concentration on technique is likely to lead to impotence.
In all advanced industrial societies, education has become the single most important vehicle of upward mobility.
Religion is the human attitude towards a sacred order that includes within it all being-human or otherwise-i.e., belief in a cosmos, the meaning of which both includes and transcends man.
In a market economy, however, the individual has some possibility of escaping from the power of the state