Peter L. Berger

Peter L. Berger was an Austrian-born American sociologist best known for The Social Construction of Reality (1966), co-written with Thomas Luckmann, which argued that what people experience as objective, taken-for-granted social reality is in fact produced and sustained through ongoing human activity and given the appearance of an external, self-evident order through habitualization and institutionalization. Berger was also a leading figure in the sociology of religion, where his book The Sacred Canopy (1967) examined how religious systems function to construct and legitimate a meaningful social order against the threat of chaos. He later revised his earlier secularization thesis, arguing that the modern world remained furiously religious rather than steadily secularizing.