The Essence of an Accidental Sociologist: An Appreciation of Peter Berger

Soc (2012) 49:168–174 DOI 10.1007/s12115-011-9522-8 PROFILE The Essence of an Accidental Sociologist: An Appreciation of Peter Berger David Martin Published online: 19 January 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 This is a rather personal and provisional attempt to catch the essence of a major scholar who entitled his instructive memoir of 2011 Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist. I shall not attempt any appraisal of those seminal works by Peter Berger from the early sixties onwards that have had an impact on the thinking of all of us. Nor shall I attempt to look at his notable and creative collaborations, above all with Thomas Luckmann and Hansfried Kellner, let alone comment on his lifetime’s conversation with Brigitte Berger. My title is accurate, and I hope it allows me to begin with some initial recollections of my friendship, my indebtedness, and my intellectual companionship with Peter Berger. These recollections also illustrate some of our fundamental agreements. After that initial excursus I want to reflect on Peter Berger’s unique place and role in sociology, especially the sociology of religion. I shall take the opportunity to say something about our discipline as an instantly recognisable form of intellectual activity, while at the same time being very disparate and crossing all kinds of boundaries. We sociologists sail in the same sea with the same compasses and with similar equipment, but our routes often barely cross. Yet I begin precisely with the way Peter Berger’s trackways have intersected with mine. I first read Peter Berger browsing through new books in the London School of Economics library and drawn by a title that promised something different, The Precarious Vision, published in 1961. It was in a genre I have myself practised from time to time which I call socio-theology and it spoke of a release enjoyed by social scientists and D. Martin (*) 174 St. John’s Road, Woking, Surrey GU21 7PQ, UK e-mail: Christians alike from bondage to social fictions and the fragile tissue of man-made institutions. At that time the depredations of the late sixties and seventies had not yet fully apprised me of the importance of man-made institutions or the dangers of liberation from social fictions. I was already dubious, yet intrigued, because I knew Berger’s language and where he was coming from. I had recently been a critical observer at a conference on Bonhoeffer and The Death of the Church and I had seen the later sixties prefigured in theology, and not, as sociologists might suppose, merely reflected. Somewhat later, maybe in Theology Today for October 1967, I read Peter Berger on the subject of Barthianism. I was again intrigued, because it seemed Berger had abandoned the Indian rope trick of Barthian theology and was in pursuit of what in 1969 he called A Rumor of Angels and ‘signals of transcendence’ entirely within our human projections. Not being a Barthian myself, I rather relished the way Peter Berger put down and relativised the absolutisers in the Barthian mode. I first encountered Peter Berger more directly some time after I had written my initial critique in 1965 of ideological elements embedded in the concept of secularization. To my delight as a young lecturer I received an appreciative letter from Peter saying that I had a worthwhile point, but that something major had changed since the seventeenth century (let’s say) , and if we were to abandon the catch-all notion of secularization then we needed to formulate what that change was. Peter gave me a chance to engage with others in that enterprise in 1969 when he invited me to a consultation at the Vatican on ‘The Culture of Unbelief’ organised by the Secretariatus pro non Credentibus. At one point the 1965 article about secularization came in very handy. As it was hot, the group I was chairing decided we would be better Soc (2012) 49:168–174 occupied walking on the greensward around the Villa Borghese. When we returned Peter told me an Italian Television crew had arrived and I must offer them the fruits of our labours. Deeply embarrassed I explained there had been no labours to speak of, and Peter just said ‘In that case just make them up’. This I did in a way which astonished my group and myself because I simply rehearsed the argument of my critique of secularization. Then there was the occasion later in 1969 when I chaired a lecture by Peter Berger in the famous Old Theatre of the London School of Economics on what was for him a very typical theme, Sociology: Radical and Conservative. This must have been the point when so far as these people were concerned Peter Berger came out for what he really was: someone with a quiet nostalgia for the multicultural pluralism of Austria-Hungary. Quite a segment of radical London turned up to hear the radical first half of the lecture assuming that Peter was not only an analyst of the social construction of reality but an ardent advocate and prophet of its deconstruction. I also think some of them had read a witty and seminal article he had published in 1964 with Hansfried Kellner in Diogenes on the mutual collusions generated in the family, and they were excited because they supposed he was a natural partisan of the dissolution of the family. When the charismatic prophet ceased to prophesy and turned to the second part of the lecture on the theme of sociology and social conservation they were restive and outraged. Peter Berger reproached them for their bad manners, and said he drew comfort from the fact that such politically hyper-active people had to sleep, and might one day be properly burdened with the responsibilities of parenthood. This drove them into a manic fury, and I had to bring the event to a rapid conclusion. Peter had lighted on the unpalatable fact that a child of the Enlightenment like sociology was also capable of undermining the key empirical assumptions of its parent ideology. Sociology is bound to recognise the logic of conservation and stability as well as the logic of change, and to acknowledge the ambiguities of what people too easily believe are the unambiguous gains of progress and liberation. Peter Berger was right to refer to manners, sleep and parenthood. Manners, sleep, automatic habit and the respects and pre-emptive assumptions of responsible parenthood, are the prerequisites of revision and renewal, and sharply constrain the pursuit of existential authenticity, Protestant sincerity, and untrammelled freedom. The reaction of radical London was not all that surprising, and maybe the radicals intuited the existence of an earlier left-wing Peter Berger. These people had read Berger in a way that fitted the preoccupations of partisans of the early Marx, oblivious of the existence of other people on the right and the older left, let alone those you might just call realists, who believed there 169 really was an external facticity about social processes. Peter could easily be read as a prophet of emancipati (...truncated)