Abstract
Over a long and prodigiously fertile academic career, Peter Berger’s vision of sociology has consistently emphasized its debunking and unmasking properties. Such properties, Berger contends, are evidence of sociology’s humanistic promise. Following a brief description of his early transition from The Precarious Vision (a sociological book addressed principally to Christians) to Invitation to Sociology (a text keyed to a mostly secular audience), Berger’s idea of humanism is described. So, too, are the roles that debunking and unmasking play in its articulation. Debunking and unmasking, conflated by Berger, are then analytically distinguished, historically located, and criticized. Debunking, an American specialty, ridicules its targets but explains nothing. Unmasking, of European provenance, has pronounced anti-humanist – violent, denunciatory, coercive – tendencies, evidenced in both the French and Bolshevik Revolutions. Accordingly, any defense of unmasking that claims to uphold humanism requires major qualification. The article, as well as assessing Berger’s humanism, employs it as an opportunity to think more broadly, and more critically, about the types of debunking/unmasking in modern life.
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Notes
Admittedly, the religious connotations of “vision” can be readily secularized. An example is Schumpeter’s (1954: 41) depiction of the “vision” of great economists. Vision is a “preanalytic cognitive act that supplies the raw material for the analytic effort.”
Mencken (1982 [1949]: 265) recalled in a short foreword written several years after this Smart Set review - “Professor Veblen” [1919] - that: “I heard from some of [Veblen’s] friends that my onslaught had greatly upset him, and, in fact, made him despair of the Republic. He died in 1929.”
Thomas Carlyle, a conservative who also wrote a book on the French Revolution, took a far more critical view of custom than Burke did. In Sartor Resartus (1994 [1836]: 304, 125), Carlyle claimed that custom habituated humans to stupidity. Burke would have shuddered at the contention of Carlyle’s alter ego, Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh (= God Begotten Devil’s Dung), that “The beginning of Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with armed eyesight, till they become transparent,” p. 170 (emphasis in the original).
Revolutionary thinkers such as Marat, Mercier and Desmoulins found the distinction between denunciation and delation inherently unstable, so that even “informing” took on positive hues. On this debate, as arcane as it was deadly for those caught within its casuistry, see Guilhaumou 1994 passim and Lucas 1996: 768,785.
Piety is an attribution in the same way that goodness is. One cannot describe oneself as pious and be considered as pious by others.
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Baehr, P. The Undoing of Humanism: Peter L. Berger’s Sociology of Unmasking. Soc 50, 379–390 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9673-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-013-9673-x