Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s major, most renowned, and significant book is definitely The Social Construction of Reality. A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, published in 1966 (Berger/Luckmann 1989 [1966]). This publication is considered as classical writing of the sociological discipline. The International Sociological Association (ISA) lists it as the fifth most influential sociological book written in the twentieth century (ISA 1998), directly after Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber 1958). The ground-breaking success of The Social Construction of Reality had to do with the specific zeitgeist of the 1960s combined with a re-definition of a sociology of knowledge and uniting presumably very contrary theoretical social scientific paradigms of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and George Herbert Mead (Eberle 1992). The “revolutionary spirit” of the current times was combined with a decisive new orientation in the social sciences, specifically with respect to sociology of knowledge. If we follow Berger’s argumentation, the book was written in the eve of the cultural revolution in the Western world, in the late 1960s, when the social sciences and other disciplines were characterized by various forms of neo-Marxism. The two authors did use Marx’ writings, but they were not Marxists (Endress 2019: 57). Berger describes the late 1960s as “an enormous rock concert” (Vera 2016a: 23). But the effect of the book came later, because according to Berger, in the cacophony of cultural upheaval the sober tone of the book could not be appreciated: “It is not possible to play chamber music at a rock festival” (Berger 2011: 92; Steets 2016a).

Both scholars, Berger and Luckmann, were students of the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where one of their teachers, Alfred Schutz, had a major impact on their work. Especially, when the idea for the Social Construction project came up, as Peter L. Berger explains in his autobiography (Berger 2011), it was Schutz who gave the initial idea for it. Berger and Luckmann participated in Schutz’s seminar on the sociology of knowledge, in which Schutz mainly dealt with the work and critique of other social scientists, leaving his own perspective apart.

In the final phase of his life from the autumn of 2016 to April of 2017, Peter Berger was preparing a major international research project he intended to lead together with me when I was at that time the director of the Academy of World Religions of Hamburg University. The endeavor to explore the moral limits of religious pluralism in an international consultation process was cut short by his death on 27 June 2017. Yet its goal is too important to allow it to be forgotten.

The intent of this chapter is, on the one hand, to outline the project as it emerged (cf. Weisse 2019) and lay out the ideas underlying it. On the other hand, it is also intended to give readers an insight into Berger’s strategic thinking as it found expression in our planning. A selection of e-mails he wrote during the planning phase between November 2016 and April 2017— two months before his death—will serve to illuminate his thinking “from the inside.” They demonstrate the seriousness and tenacity needed to initiate such a major project, but they also offer refreshing glimpses of his kind humor and sarcastic wit. Finally, it will paradigmatically take up the approaches developed in a discussion that took place at a commemorative event one year after his death (Weisse and Steets 2019) and sketch perspectives for further academic engagement.

The Ideas Underlying the Project “The Moral Limits of Religious Pluralism

Until the turn of the millennium, Peter Berger had viewed the secularization thesis as key to religious sociology. By the early twenty-first century, though, he was beginning to doubt its validity. At the same time, he came to regard the increasing religious pluralization of Western societies as the central development. He went on record stating: “The idea that modernity secularizes, inevitably secularizes, is wrong. Full stop. This is empirically wrong. What modernity inevitably does is: it pluralizes.” (Berger and Weisse 2010, 19). He further elaborated this approach in the context of his theory of “two pluralisms” developed after 2014:

Can violence be put into words? A question that is much more difficult than it appears at the moment of a judgement, a report or a simple narrative. As a phenomenon, violence can be depicted, it is then raw or refined, experienced directly or only in a roundabout way, it is experienced intensely or carried out at a cool distance. As an experience, however, violence is not transferable and only belongs to the person to whom it happens. Violence is therefore first of all a philosophical problem that we can approach with the help of psychological introspection, but apparently never get to its actual core.

That talking about violence presents such a difficulty is surprising given the rich body of writing that sociology and philosophy, historiography and politics have produced. Violence is a subject of the utmost seriousness and yet speaking about violence seems to face various barriers. This has not only to do with the fact that violence forms a phenomenological prism that expresses both a relational event and a structural problem. Rather, the problem goes back to the complex relationship that connects violence with the discourse about violence.

One can basically distinguish between two forms in which violence is talked about. The first possibility takes the form of a social diagnosis in which the extent of de facto violence is mapped. With the help of statistical methods, if one draws a line from the past to the present, a decrease in de facto violence could be determined. Looking at complex statistics, historical evidence and theories of civilisation, the twentieth century then receives a surprising description. This century laid the foundation for an age in which violence as a means of politics was noticeably declining, writes Steven Pinker (Pinker, 2011). The dwindling importance of violence has many sources: developmental psychology and brain physiology, education and moral theory, historical chronicles and even countable death rates all contribute to this judgement.

The other form in which we can approach violence in history and the present is the discourse on violence. While the sober analysis of historical violations relies on predictability, such as the average probability of a violent death, the discourse on violence finds itself entangled in the violence of language. It begins with the fact that it remains unclear, must remain unclear, what ‘counts’ as violence (Liebsch, 2014).

A million dead. A million fled. That is how one distinguished writer summarised the devastating consequences of the Great Famine in Ireland. In season after season in the later 1840s, a mysterious plant disease destroyed the potato crop which was the main source of food of the labouring classes. Hunger stalked the land, followed in quick succession by killer diseases. notably typhus, which preyed upon those weakened by famine. Malnutrition, disease, suffering, and, finally, death, sealed the fate of a million or so souls. As in famines elsewhere, those most affected were the poorest. In Ireland, these were the cottiers and the rural labourers, as well as a sprinkling of town labourers, who even in the best of times struggled to make a living. But these were the worst of times. When a population census was taken in 1851 at the end of the famine, a quarter of the population had vanished through death or emigration. This collapse was brutally compressed within the space of a few years.

In the context of Irish history, it was the greatest disaster since the other great famine of 1740–41. Taking a wider view, relative to population size, the catastrophe ranks among the most severe famines of the modern world. It retains an important place in the psyche of the Irish people and the Irish diaspora to this day. In recent decades, its history has become the focus of considerable scholarly and popular attention. In particular, a tremendous amount of work has been completed on mortality, emigration, relief efforts and the wider political, social and psychological consequences of the calamity, though highly politicised accounts such as genocidal interpretations of the Famine no longer enjoy wide currency. Our understanding of the Great Famine is now much more comprehensive and nuanced, as well as being firmly located in a comparative context.

Yet much remains to be retrieved and understood, particularly at the level of the rural poor. The ‘holy grail’ in terms of grasping the experience of the crisis surely must be a set of famine diaries produced by those most badly affected, small farmers, cottiers and labourers. Such personal accounts have never materialised, though at least one fake diary captured the public imagination in the 1990s.

“Objectivation” is key to the sociohistorical process of The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In the architecture of Peter L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s theory of the sociology of knowledge, objectivation is the link between action and culture. Action is what people knowingly try to bring forward; culture is the long-lasting and often unintended effect of people’s actions, for example, institutions. Objectivation is at the center of the “dialectical” process that turns subjective meaning into social facts and social facts into subjective meaning. The former, called externalization, is informed by Durkheim and his postulate of social facts; the latter, internalization, is dedicated to Max Weber and his ideal of subjective meaning. Berger and Luckmann label these processes “dialectical” since they consider them to be permanent and continuing, in the sense that they run “simultaneously” both for the individual and for society as a whole (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966, 149).

The designation of this process as dialectical is not intended to place the subjective outside the social, as it were (Knoblauch 2020, 40). Instead, from a pre-social subject, social theory needs to proceed from subjects who are set in relation to others from the very beginning of their lives. Neither subjective meaning nor consciousness but relationality is therefore the starting point of social theory, which—similar to what is described in interactionism as the “looking-glass effect”—results in reflexivity and subjectivity.

Husserl’s phenomenology, referring back to Kant and Descartes, is the classical source of subjectivity as a theoretical stance. It was Alfred Schütz who, informed by Bergson’s time phenomenology and Dewey’s pragmatism, transferred subjectivity into the empirical fact of intersubjectivity (cf. Schütz 1970). Anthropologically, actors must not be seen as entities already endowed with subjectivity but with the “capacity of subjectivation” (Steets 2019, 136). According to Silke Steets, “subjectivation is never just a one-way street from society to the subject. It is this interplay between one’s own reference to others and external reference from others that subjectifies” (Steets 2019, 136). Meaning is the way in which subjects relate to one another. And objectivations are crucial in these continuing action processes because they mediate the way in which subjects are able to refer to each other.

I am not a sociologist, and thus will not venture to comment on Peter Berger’s contributions to that discipline. What I can testify to is how he helped to change the orientation of my own thinking and of my work as a government official and policy consultant.

We met when I was in my mid-thirties and a figure of some notoriety in the Boston area as the state official responsible for educational equity, including bilingual education, sex equity, and other controversial agendas. Most visibly, I was responsible for pushing forward the lagging desegregation of the Boston and other public schools; by 1974, as school buses rolled to implement a plan of which I was the principal author, I was widely known and resented as “Mr. Busing.” The Boston Globe called me “the state’s lightning rod for the stormy protests against the racial imbalance law and the plans for Boston and Springfield schools,” while Anthony Lucas, in Common Ground, described me as having “a passionate zeal on racial issues.”

In education policy circles 50 years later, by contrast, I’m often considered a conservative, in particular as a strong supporter of parental choice in its many forms: charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling. I have served as expert witness supporting public funding of faith-based schools in a number of cases. I’m also very critical of much that is done or proposed in the name of racial justice, and of the current obsession with racial and other identities.

What happened? Is this an illustration of Robert Frost’s quip, “I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old”? Have I abandoned my youthful convictions and become complacent about racial and other injustices? Not at all; I believe I am as passionate as ever about these continuing and evolving problems, but I learned from experience and from my own mistakes, and from Peter Berger, to advocate for more effective remedies.

Peter Berger played a key role in this rethinking—really a broadening—of my understanding of what justice requires and how to pursue it.

The global COVID-19 pandemic has fostered unprecedented social and economic disruption, forcing most governments to introduce severe measures to contain the virus, such as travel restrictions, bans of public events, closures of non-essential businesses and transition to remote work and education.

To understand and respond better to the COVID-19 pandemic dynamics, countries worldwide are using data and statistics to drive mitigation and eradication-led strategies as well as forecast future pandemics and public health crises.

With an ever-changing data ecosystem, challenges posed by this global pandemic have accelerated the more extensive use of private sector data and intensified the need for improved data governance, principles and tools for data privacy protection.

Rapid deployment and adoption of self-reporting apps and data-analytic technologies to collect new data, use existing data in novel ways (e.g. symptom tracking, contact tracing, mobility and density mapping, quarantine enforcement, health and immunity passes), have raised deep concerns about surveillance tactics, privacy, personal data protection and civil liberties.

The increased speed of technological innovation and goal-directed processes reflect the acceleration of social change (e.g. cultural and institutional norms), and the pace of life affecting the tech industry, where speed acts as an important part of the business model, both among large tech companies and start-ups.

Rapid innovation is important in a crisis, not only so that companies can exploit market advantages in what author of The Shock Doctrine, activist Naomi Klein, also describes as ‘disaster capitalism’: in this context, life-, society- and economy-preserving solutions can be rolled out where needed.

Protecting privacy in the context of any crisis is complex. Risks of abuse, distrust and unaccountability in governments and in technology companiesdeveloping these tools and applications may arise and lead to a more fundamental question of whether the technologically enhanced forms of high-tech monitoring and surveillance products for COVID-19-related public health use may become a permanent part of the new normal.

The right to privacy is a globally recognised normative ideal ratified in international treaties and national constitutions. It is of particular importance for protecting global vulnerable and marginalised communities, particularly from small- and middle-income countries at highest risk for contracting and dying from COVID-19. There are reasons to be concerned that structural inequalities in data access and exposure to privacy invasion disproportionately affect disadvantaged societal groups.

As is well known, there is ‘no language’ for violence in the age of extremes. This statement means: this violence can be explained and described, its course and the conditions of its emergence can be ‘deciphered’, but despite everything it eludes classification in the historical horizon. The extent of the destruction and suffering is known, perhaps even quantifiable, but at the same time incomprehensible. Recognisable devastation is overshadowed by a doubt: whether the disastrous violence, which found its incalculable form in fascism, did not destroy the possibilities of seeing others. Philosophy saw itself overwhelmed, as it were, by factual history; it first had to ‘find’ a language again in order to be able to counter the destruction of human conditions.

Admittedly, in what framework was this language to exist when the experience of violence suffered had proved so fundamental that everything was thrown into doubt? To understand the violence of a self-destructive Europe, one needed a new beginning in thinking. T. W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers, but also M. Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Finkielkraut and Maurice Blanchot translated the experience of the final unsecuring of human orders into their philosophical thoughts.

The experience of abandonment led them (as well as contemporary social theory) to a fundamental revision of the human form of life. In this form of life, the ideas that have been handed down no longer apply: that one is together in the world under the stars, that there is a lawfulness within us that makes morality and reason possible, that there are connections and meanings among people. These possibilities, he argues, were fundamentally knocked out of hand by the radical enmity that has since been headlined Auschwitz (Liebsch, 2018, p. 134). So how this violence and human forms of life would be thought together is in question. It is the question of the face of history.

A contradictoriness is decisive for this face. The disastrous violence seems to have taken place in its extreme form outside any human world, human language, human understanding. It destroyed the self-understanding with which one could view oneself and others, with which one could live together with others and found a political world. Loss had a metaphysical connotation, as it were: it appeared as a form of encroaching violence whose origin had to remain unclear.

David Ricardo was born in London on 18 April 1772 into a prosperous family of Sephardic Jews. He died on 11 September 1823 from an ear infection. His father, Abraham Israel Ricardo (1733–1812) worked as a broker in the City of London and left a fortune of about £45,000. Some years ago, I made a back-of-the-envelope estimate that this would amount to approximately £23 million today (King 2013: 3). Abraham and his wife Abigail had at least seventeen children, of whom all but three were still alive when David died. Two of his younger brothers lived to the ripe old age of 89: Raphael or Ralph (1785–1875) and Moses (1776–1886), who wrote a celebrated ‘Memoir’ of his famous elder brother (X: 3–15). The reference is to volume X of the elevenvolume Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, and this format will be used in all references to the Works throughout this book.

Surprisingly little is known about David Ricardo's youth. He did not have a particularly good education. As his brother Moses recalled, their father

The young David, on the other hand

In December 1791, he married Priscilla Ann Wilkinson, a Quaker, which caused considerable tension with his devoutly Jewish parents. By this time, he was a convinced liberal who had no remaining commitment to Judaism.

Even more than his father, David Ricardo was highly successful in his business activities. ‘Ricardo, at the time of his marriage, was a poor man’, Max Hartwell wrote. However,

A Form of Critical Philosophy of History

Another history of violence? Has violence not been sufficiently and extensively explained? Is it not before our eyes in the countless books, so that we would only have to ‘inform’ ourselves accordingly? What is the point of reconstructing history if we cannot expect something fundamentally new that leads beyond the known abysses of the history of violence?

History is full of dark shades that reach into the present. The past, however, does not stand still but forces each generation to look up and take a close look. Hot and cold procedures of memory bring this history to life. In the centre of the present discussion, these procedures are to be expanded by a special approach. The dark spots of history that are being talked about here are significant – they accompany us in all present actions. In a very generalised form, it is about visualising, perceiving and coping with the violence of past times. Violence has shaped past eras, and war has shown its many faces differently in each age. However, this violence has also been perceived as an evil in the long run and has been fought with serious initiatives.

The attempts to nurture war and make peace possible lead us to a difficult point in history. It is possible that we are at a point where the relations of violence need to be reinterpreted differently. But it is also possible that violence has only changed its face, giving rise to new narratives of violence.

The preconditions of such a history of violence are not simple. First of all, we assume a uniformity and generality that conditions the frivolous talk of a history: an ‘we’ stands in this history as the subject of action and a continuous line is drawn from the past to the present. In this respect alone, the present work exposes itself to various reproaches. Humanity as a collective subject is a mere insinuation – and to the same extent history should not look beyond particular cultures. In order to counter these possible critical objections, several points need to be clarified, which at the same time leads to the methodological premises of what follows.