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Peter Berger and the Comedic Drama of Political, Economic and Social Life

  • Symposium: Peter Berger’s Achievement in Social Science
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Abstract

Peter L. Berger’s work offers his readers a window into the human drama in all its dimension: political, economic and social. He invites his readers to think intensely, endlessly, and shamelessly about the doings of man. Through a comparative analysis of Invitation to Sociology this paper discusses Berger’s contributions to the sciences of man in terms of methodological individualism, the theory of unintended consequences, spontaneous sociability, institutional analysis, and freedom. In so doing, I hope to show that Berger’s work demonstrates the intellectual power of spontaneous order analysis and the link between the humanistic project in sociology and our understanding of the human condition in general and the freedom of the individual in society in particular.

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Further Reading

  • Aligica, P., & Boettke, P. 2009. Challenging institutional analysis and development: The Bloomington school. New York: Routledge.

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  • Berger, P. 1963. Invitation to sociology. New York: Doubleday.

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  • Boulding, K. 1948. Samuelson’s foundations: The role of mathematics in economics. Journal of Political Economy, 56, 187–199.

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  • Elster, J. 2009. Alexis de Tocqueville: The first social scientist. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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  • Hayek, F. A. 1952. The counter-revolution of science. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1980.

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  • Mayer, T. 2009. Invitation to economics. New York: Wiley.

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  • Ostrom, V. 1997. The meaning of democracy and the vulnerability of democracies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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  • Swedberg, R. 2009. Tocqueville’s political economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA, 22030, USA

    Peter J. Boettke

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  1. Peter J. Boettke
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Correspondence to Peter J. Boettke.

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Boettke, P.J. Peter Berger and the Comedic Drama of Political, Economic and Social Life. Soc 47, 178–185 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-010-9308-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-010-9308-4

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