1. Berger, Peter and Luckmann, Thomas, The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. viGoogle Scholar. Citations are of the paperback edition published in 1967, hereafter abbreviated SCR.

2. The phrase is that of Parsons, Talcott, “about whose theory we [Berger and Luckmann] have serious misgivings, but whose integrative intention we fully share” (SCR, p. 17).Google Scholar

3. Throughout The Social Construction of Reality Berger and Luckmann use “he” in the conventional generic sense. I have retained their usage because their intention is to describe processes, the structures of which are the same for males and females at the level of abstraction they employ. They are aware that the content of socialization is gender-specific.

4. Berger, Peter, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 3Google Scholar. Published a year after The Social Construction of Reality, The Sacred Canopy (hereafter cited as SC) contains Berger's summary of the theoretical position elaborated in the earlier work. It thus provides a convenient condensation of Berger and Luckmann's formulation.

5. Ibid., p. 4.

6. I have used the phrase “man's nature” rather than “human nature” because of Berger and Luckmann's tendency to construe the latter as designating a biological “core” of instincts or whatever. See, for example, their rejection of Freudian psychology (SCR, pp. 195–96)Google Scholar, which I discuss later in this essay. In his Introduction to Facing Up to Modernity, Berger elaborates on his view of man's nature, stressing the organismic need for a large measure of order, triviality, and continuity in everyday life; see Facing Up to Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. xiv–xvGoogle Scholar. The normative implications of this view of man's nature, largely obscured in The Social Construction of Reality, are more prominent in Berger's later writings.

7. SC, p. 4.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., pp. 16–17.

9. The term “recognition” is Percy, Walker's in his essay “Symbol, Consciousness, and Intersubjectivity,” in The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), esp. pp. 272–76.Google Scholar

10. For a compact and responsible summary of leading elements of Schutz's work, see Bernstein, Richard, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)Google Scholar. Bernstein also assesses the argument, to which Schutz was a party, concerning the ontological primacy of the Lebenswelt, or world of everyday reality. Schutz had a profound impact on the development of ethnomethodology, especially the work of Garfinkel and Cicourel. Berger and Luckmann acknowledge the insights of Goffman, a pioneer ethnomethodologist whose early works, such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, were available to them. Like the insights of Freud, however, Goffman's findings are considered by Berger and Luckmann to have severely limited sociohistorical applicability.

11. In their reliance on Mead, Berger and Luckmann follow both Schutz and Arnold Gehlen, whose theory of institutionalization incorporated Meadian insights and decisively influenced Berger and Luckmann's treatment of thatsubject.

12. SCR, pp. 5–10, 49–51, 61, 86–89, 108–9, 187.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 6.

14. Ibid., pp. 108–9.

15. In their view, “Most psychological models, including those of contemporary scientific psychology, have limited socio-historical applicability,” hence their conclusion “that a sociological psychology will at the same time have to be a historical psychology” (SCR, p. 207, n. 34)Google Scholar. See also their discussion of the Freudian “reality principle” (SCR, pp. 175–80).Google Scholar

16. This implication of their argument raises the question of the validity of knowledge obtained through the methods of the sociology of knowledge. Berger and Luckmann understand sociology to be an empirical discipline, and they imply that “value free” sociological analysis is both possible and desirable. Since their purpose is theory construction, however, they do not address the question of how value-free analysis is to proceed or its results are to be evaluated. They have nothing to say on the methodological problem inherent in interpretative procedures, namely, how to adjudicate among divergent interpretations of the same phenomena. “Epistemological questions concerning the validity of sociological knowledge in the sociology of knowledge” properly belong to the methodology of the social sciences and not to the empirical discipline of sociology (SCR, p. 13).Google Scholar

17. Berger, , Facing Up to Modernity, p. xviiGoogle Scholar. In this essay, originally given as an address on the occasion of his receiving an honorary degree, Berger discusses sociology as a “liberating” discipline and describes his views on “critique” as a form of value-free empirical analysis.

18. Spradley, James, Culture and Cognition (San Francisco: Chandler, 1972), p. 21.Google Scholar

19. SC, p. v.Google Scholar

20. See, for example, from a Marxian orientation, Carol, and Ohmann, Richard, “Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye,” Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1976, pp. 15–37.Google Scholar

21. For an affirmation of the possibility and desirability of reconstructing authorial intention, see Hirsch, E. D. Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967)Google Scholar. Sammons's remarks can be found in his essay “The Threat of Literary Sociology,” in Strelka, J. P., ed., Literary Criticism and Sociology (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1973)Google Scholar. On the attribution of meaning to literary tests, see Foulkes, A. P., The Search for Literary Meaning (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975).Google Scholar

22. Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977).Google Scholar

23. Sulloway, Frank J., Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), esp. pp. 419–95.Google Scholar

24. See, for example, Ohmann, Richard, English in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).Google Scholar

25. Murphey, Murray G., “The Place of Beliefs in Modern Culture,” in Higham, John and Conklin, Paul, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1979), p. 164.Google Scholar

26. Berger and Luckmann's decision to refrain from following up the methodological implications of their conception of the sociology of knowledge is interesting in light of Schutz's rigorous concept of theory as described by Bernstein, p. 137. Certainly methodological hints are scattered throughout The Social Construction of Reality, one of the more notable occurring on p. 116: “Put a little crudely, it is essential to keep pushing questions about the historically available conceptualizations of reality from the abstract ‘What?’ to the sociologically concrete ‘Says Who?’” Moreover, their argument as a whole implies Verstehen, an interpretative method. For a work that combines a similar theoretical orientation with extensive methodological stipulations, see Ford, Julienne, Paradigms and Fairy Tales: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).Google Scholar

27. Bernstein, , p. xiii.Google Scholar

28. As quoted in ibid., p. 253.