Peter L. Berger (17. 03.1929 - 27.06.2017)
Peter L. Berger was born in Vienna in 1929. From 1946 on, he lived in the USA where he studied sociology and philosophy at Wagner College and completed his master's degree at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1950. There he attended courses offered by Alfred Schutz, among others, and earned his doctorate in 1952. After a two-year stay in Germany, Berger taught and conducted research as an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina from 1956 to 1958, and then he transferred to Hartford Theological Seminary as an associate professor. From 1963 to 1971, he was a professor at the New School, from 1971 to 1979 at Rutgers University and starting in 1979 at Boston College. In 1981, Berger became a professor at Boston University and, in 1985, director of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture, which he reformed in 2003 into the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. From 1966 to 1967, he served as president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. He died in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2017.
Notably, because of his co-authored work with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (1966), Peter L. Berger can be counted among the most important representatives of the phenomenological school within sociology. In this book, the two authors elaborate a phenomenologically grounded sociology of knowledge, which provides the basis for the scientific analysis of both everyday social life and other areas of reality. Thematically, Berger focused on modernity and pluralization, religion and de-secularization, as well as culture and socioeconomic change. The Social Science Archive Konstanz has been in possession of the original Peter L. Berger Papers since 2019.