Book Freak #229: The Social Construction of Reality

Get The Social Construction of Reality

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) argues that the social world around us, and our understanding of it, is something people fabricated together. Even though we made it, it feels as solid and real as nature, and we usually don’t remember making it.

It reminds me of the “imagined orders” Yuval Noah Harari describes in Sapiens. Enough people believe in money, nations, companies, and human rights that we treat them as real things instead of agreements. The International Sociological Association named it the fifth most influential sociology book of the century.

Reality Is Made in Three Steps

People make the social world, then experience it as a fact outside themselves, then absorb it.

“It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity. The process by which the externalized products of human activity attain the character of objectivity is objectivation. The institutional world is objectivated human activity, and so is every single institution.”

“It is already possible, however, to see the fundamental relationship of these three dialectical moments in social reality. Each of them corresponds to an essential characterization of the social world. Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product. It may also already be evident that an analysis of the social world that leaves out any one of these three moments will be distortive.”

Habits Become Institutions

It starts with routine.

“All human activity is subject to habitualization. Any action that is repeated frequently becomes cast into a pattern, which can then be reproduced with an economy of effort and which, ipso facto, is apprehended by its performer as that pattern. ... Even the solitary individual on the proverbial desert island habitualizes his activity. When he wakes up in the morning and resumes his attempts to construct a canoe out of matchsticks, he may mumble to himself, ‘There I go again,’ as he starts on step one of an operating procedure consisting of, say, ten steps. In other words, even solitary man has at least the company of his operating procedures.”

Once people share habits and pass them down, they become institutions.

“The institutions, as historical and objective facticities, confront the individual as undeniable facts. The institutions are there, external to him, persistent in their reality, whether he likes it or not. He cannot wish them away. They resist his attempts to change or evade them.”

Language Builds the World

“In the early phases of socialization the child is quite incapable of distinguishing between the objectivity of natural phenomena and the objectivity of the social formations. To take the most important item of socialization, language appears to the child as inherent in the nature of things, and he cannot grasp the notion of its conventionality. A thing is what it is called, and it could not be called anything else. All institutions appear in the same way, as given, unalterable and self-evident.”

Teaching it to children makes it more real to the parents, too.

“The process of transmission simply strengthens the parents’ sense of reality, if only because, to put it crudely, if one says, ‘This is how these things are done,’ often enough one believes it oneself.”

Beware of Reification

“Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or possibly supra-human terms. Another way of saying this is that reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something else than human products—such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will. Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the human world, and further, that the dialectic between man, the producer, and his products is lost to consciousness.”

“As soon as an objective social world is established, the possibility of reification is never far away. The objectivity of the social world means that it confronts man as something outside of himself. The decisive question is whether he still retains the awareness that, however objectivated, the social world was made by men—and, therefore, can be remade by them.”

Try It Now

1. Pick a rule you follow without thinking, like a workplace habit or a family ritual. Trace where it came from and who started it. Could work another way?
2. Notice the labels you use today, like “busy person,” “good neighborhood,” or “real job.” Try applying a different label. Does it feel different?
3. When someone says “that’s just how it works,” consider whether it’s a law of nature or something people built. What would it take to change it?

Quote

“Social order is not part of the ‘nature of things,’ and it cannot be derived from the ‘laws of nature.’ Social order exists only as a product of human activity.”

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