My previous blog concerned C. Wright Mills and The Sociological Imagination. Here I want to go back to another influential book from the 1960s, Peter Berger’s Invitation to Sociology, published in 1963.
While Mills was writing mainly for fellow sociologists, Berger was offering an introduction to the subject for prospective students and anyone else curious about sociology. It is a striking example of how to take difficult ideas and make them accessible. One reviewer described it as the first introductory book to sociology that was actually enjoyable to read.
Berger presents sociology as an intellectual adventure. The sociologist is someone fascinated by what people do, why they do it and, above all, what lies beneath apparently ordinary behaviour. He particularly emphasises the importance of looking behind appearances.. What people say they are doing, or believe they are doing, may be quite different from what a sociological investigation reveals. Things are not what they seem.
He gives several examples, but the one that really hit home with students I taught was romantic love. We like to think of falling in love as something spontaneous and irresistible, something that simply happens to us. Berger is not so sure. He points out that ‘Cupid’s arrow’ seems to follow some rather predictable paths. People tend to fall in love with, and marry, others from similar social, educational, economic, religious and ethnic backgrounds.
Perhaps, then, it is not simply love that creates a relationship. Rather, the social circumstances in which people meet and form relationships help create the conditions in which they fall in love. In other words, we are not quite as free in choosing our partners as we might imagine.
For Berger, sociology is about stepping back from what we take for granted and uncovering less obvious explanations. It has a ‘debunking’ quality, showing that things we regard as natural and inevitable may actually be socially constructed. What is considered perfectly normal in one society may seem quite extraordinary in another.
Of course, this is not easy to recognise. We are born into a world in which social arrangements are already in place, and many have been there for generations. They become part of the landscape, and we rarely stop to question them.
Berger goes on to argue that society shapes us in two further ways. First, we live within social structures that constrain what we can do. This is familiar enough. We have rules, laws, institutions and expectations which place limits on our behaviour.
His second argument is more interesting, and perhaps more unsettling. Society does not simply control us from the outside; it gets inside us. Through socialisation, we absorb the values, expectations and assumptions of the society in which we live. We don’t just obey social rules because someone tells us to. We come to believe that many of these rules are natural, reasonable and even morally necessary.
He gives several examples, but the one I remember best concerns the army. Imagine a soldier who has recently been commissioned as an officer after coming up through the ranks. At first, he feels a little embarrassed when other soldiers salute him. After all, he is still the same person he was before his promotion. He responds almost apologetically. But gradually he becomes accustomed to his new position. He begins to expect the salutes and eventually regards a failure to salute as a personal affront.
What makes this example so striking is that the role changes the person. The officer does not merely learn to behave like an officer; he gradually comes to think and feel like one. Society has, as it were, got inside his head.
The book certainly made an impression on me, and on many others. Going back to it, I was curious to see what contemporary reviewers had made of it. I looked up some of the reviews written shortly after its publication.
They all seemed to recognise Berger’s gift for writing, his striking examples and his witty asides. But they were not always so enthusiastic about his arguments. One reviewer felt that he was presenting one particular strand of sociology as though it represented the discipline as a whole. Another criticism was that he paid insufficient attention to the economic basis of social control and to the politics of power.
I can see the point of these criticisms. But I couldn’t help detecting a little academic sour grapes. Here was someone who had written what was, by academic standards, a bestseller. Perhaps some of his colleagues wished they had got there first.
The more interesting criticism, for me, was that Berger placed too much emphasis on the control that social institutions exercise over us and too little on agency.
To be fair, he did recognise that people could resist or manipulate social expectations. Chapter 6 explores the possibilities of resistance, role distance and what might be called social manoeuvring. Towards the end of the book, he compares human beings to puppets, but with one crucial difference: unlike puppets, we can recognise the strings that control our movements. Understanding how society works gives us at least some possibility of freedom.
Even so, I think he underplayed this side of the argument. During my lifetime I have seen institutions change much more rapidly, and sometimes more radically, than I would once have thought possible.
Take his example of marriage. In Britain, marriage has been extended to include same-sex couples, something that would have been difficult to imagine when Berger was writing. Relationships and marriages across ethnic boundaries have also become more common. Cohabitation, once rather disapprovingly described as ‘living in sin’, has become an entirely ordinary part of life, particularly for younger couples. I have watched marriage seemingly fall out of favour and then find renewed appeal, sometimes accompanied by elaborate new rituals and celebrations.
None of this means that social constraints have disappeared. Far from it. But it does suggest that people do more than simply absorb the expectations of the society around them. They question them, resist them and sometimes change them. And when enough people do so, what once seemed natural and permanent can come to look rather old-fashioned.
Perhaps Berger would have agreed. After all, the possibility of recognising and escaping the strings was part of his argument. I just wish he had given it a little more attention.
I still like this book enormously. It works as an introduction to sociology because it makes the subject sound interesting, and it encourages readers to look at the familiar world in unfamiliar ways. In spite of the reservations I have outlined, I would recommend it to anyone wanting to understand what sociology has to offer.
Berger himself returned to these questions many years later. In a 2002 article, Whatever Happened to Sociology?, he recalled writing Invitation to Sociology when he was still full of enthusiasm for the discipline. He had become increasingly disappointed with what sociology had turned into. In particular, he believed that it had moved away from the humanistic and intellectually open approach he had advocated, becoming too preoccupied with elaborate methodology on the one hand and political advocacy on the other.
It is a rather sad conclusion from someone who had once been so enthusiastic about the possibilities of sociology. But perhaps it is also a reason to return to his book. Whatever its limitations, it reminds us that sociology can be an enjoyable intellectual adventure, and that questioning what we take for granted is a worthwhile activity in itself.
Berger, P. L. (2002). Whatever happened to sociology? First Things, 126 (October), 27–29.
Berger, P. L. (1963). Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
