Book by Peter Berger The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge For information on ordering, please click here.

Social order exists, Peter Berger says, “only as a product of human activity.” Both in its genesis (“social order is the result of past human activity”) and its existence at any instant of time (“social order exists only and insofar as human activity continues to produce it”), it is a human product.

How liberating are these words from Berger, reminding us that culture and the institutional order exist only insofar as human beings have produced or created culture and the institutional order.

What an oppressive world of social theory we have been compelled to live in all these years since the publication of Berger's book (in 1964), ”dominated by terms such as “discourse” and “narrative” and “the symbolic order,” each suggesting a world “out there” shaping our minds and bodies as if independent and separate from the thoughts and actions of actual human beings.

The objectivity of the social world, Berger says, means that it confronts man as something outside himself. The decisive question, however, is whether he retains the awareness that--although we encounter the social world as objective facticity, this reality was “made by men (and women) and therefore can be remade by them.”

Culture is “objective,” Berger says, in that it confronts us as an “assemblage of objects in the real world” outside of our own consciousness. We experience culture (the objects that constitute culture) as “there.” Institutions resist our attempts to change or evade them. They have coercive power over us” by the sheer force of their facticity, and through the control mechanisms attached to the most important of them.

Institutions, as historical and objective “facticities,” are experienced as “objective reality.” They confront us as undeniable facts external to us and persistent in their reality whether we like it or not. Culture is objective in that we experience it as a real world separate from our own consciousness. But its objectivity is also constituted, Berger explains, by the fact that it is experienced and apprehended “in company.” Culture is “there for everybody.”

The fact that it is there for everybody distinguishes the objects of culture from the constructions of the subjective consciousness of solitary individuals. Culture is the “external world,” remaining real by virtue of collective recognition. To be in culture is to “share a particular world with others.”

Culture constitutes a shared social reality. “Society,” then, is a product of human activity that has “attained the status of objective reality.” Social formations are experienced by us as “elements of an objective world" confronting us as an external, “coercive facticity.”

Indeed, Berger observes, society is commonly apprehended by us as virtually “equivalent to the physical universe in its objective presence.” Society is experienced as a given “out there,” extraneous to subjective consciousness and “not controlled by the latter.”

Culture as an “objective, a priori reality” impresses itself upon consciousness in the “most massive, urgent and intense manner.” We experience the assemblage of cultural objects as “self-evident and compelling facticities.”

No human construction can be called a social phenomenon, Berger explains, unless it has achieved that measure of objectively that “compels the individual to recognize it as real.” The fundamental “coerciveness of society” lies not in its machineries of social control, but in its power to “constitute and impose itself in reality.”

Although we experience the institutional world as a facticity, or objective reality, Berger insists that we recognize that society is a “humanly constructed objectivity.” The social order is a human product or, more precisely, an “ongoing human production.” It is produced by men, Berger says, in the “course of his ongoing externalization.” As man externalizes himself, he “constructs the world into which he externalizes himself.” In the process of externalization, he “projects his own meanings into reality.”