Who knew that sociologists regard economists in roughly the same way the Redskins view the Dallas Cowboys? In this memoir of his scholarly career, Peter L. Berger writes that, with a few exceptions, economists are “as impervious as fundamentalist mullahs to any language other than the one allegedly revealed to them, and to them alone.” He later approvingly cites a conversation with Bernard Lewis, in which the distinguished Islamicist confesses that he’s been thinking of writing an essay on economics but has settled only on the opening lines:
“In the history of human thought science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?”
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Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(Prometheus Books) - "Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist: How to Explain the World Without Becoming a Bore" by Peter L. Berger
In “Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist,” Berger makes clear that while he may be an authority on religion and modernity, he isn’t himself solemn or pontifical. He came to this country as a teenager from Vienna and, being without any money, enrolled in the New School for Social Research because he could work during the day and attend classes at night. He started in 1949 and earned a doctorate in sociology in 1954. At the sherry party celebrating his newly awarded PhD, he recalls meeting one of his advisers, who spoke to him in German:
“Very well, Berger. You are now a doctor. Congratulations. But tell me: Do you really believe all the nonsense you wrote in this dissertation?”
Berger then comments: “He smiled warmly as he said this. His intention was clear: He knew that there was no way of replying to his question without appearing to be foolish. ‘Yes, I believe the nonsense’? ‘I don’t think I wrote any nonsense’? I said nothing, just laughed; he laughed too. He just wanted to make me a little uncomfortable and to stop me from having delusions of grandeur. In this he succeeded.”
In his memoir, Berger certainly displays a particularly cleareyed sense of self. Though he once planned to become a Lutheran minister, he makes obvious his liking for jokes, attractive women, smoking and lively coffeehouse conversation. He tells us that he cranked out his immensely popular “Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective” (1963) in all of three weeks. A few years later, during summer holidays, he wrote (and published) two novels, one of which, “The Enclaves,” involves a protagonist who navigates various alternate realities and includes “the legend of a lost realm of eastern Hungarians,” the Magyar section of the New York Public Library and an erotic master-slave fantasy.
Since the 1970s, Berger admits to having felt increasingly removed from — or marginalized by — contemporary sociology, having no flair for quantitative analysis and little sympathy with leftist political agendas. As a social scientist, he stresses that his research is as “value-free” as he can make it, but that as a man, he is a moderate Christian, and as a citizen, he is what we might call a cultural conservative. He doesn’t disguise the fact that wealthy Texas businessmen and right-leaning think tanks have often sponsored his work.
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