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

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, this paper shows 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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