Brigitte berger biography

In the s many of these scholars were still around, teaching a very European version of sociology in close interaction with history, philosophy and literature. Brigitte received both of her degrees from the New School. Her M. Her thesis dealt with the perspective of a declining class, the old aristocracy being replaced by the bourgeoisie running the new bureaucracy needed by the centralized state.

The doctoral dissertation was an interpretation of Vilfredo Pareto, the eccentric Italian economist turned sociologist, whom Brigitte saw as a precursor of the sociology of knowledge. Her first book, Societies in Change , reflected the broad comparative approach she mainly absorbed from the work of Max Weber. Her major interest from then on was the sociology of the family, childhood and youth.

In the s Brigitte and I spent considerable periods of time in Mexico, in the idiosyncratic think-tank Centro Intercultural de Documentacion Cultural run by Ivan Illich in Cuernacava. Both of us became very interested in the problems of modernization and development. Illich could not be sqeezed into any ideological bottle, but virtually all Mexican sociologists we talked with were Marxists of one sort or any other; we wanted to approach the phenomena of modernization in a non-Marxist basically Weberian perspective.

Needless to say, this put us at odds with the tsunami of neo-Marxism sweeping the social sciences, not only in Latin America but in the U. Eastern Europe was a different matter. The best antidote against Marxism is to live in a country with a Marxist regime. Brigitte once opined that if the State Department wanted to advance democracy and love of America, it should fund a program for American and European students to study in the Soviet Union.

The books contained both empirical analyses and Brigitte had an extensive knowledge of the relevant sociological and historical literature as well as her own policy positions. The books were not influential. The reasons are revealed by the respective subtitles. Brigitte was unambiguously opposed to the Zeitgeist of American academia in the wake of the cultural revolution of the s.

And the identity politics of the time did indeed come to view the heterosexual family as only one of several equally valid personal lifestyles. As a sociologist, Brigitte stood the earlier theory of the family much favored by sociologists in the s on its head: The so-called nuclear family husband, wife and children living in households separate from extended kin had been understood as a product of modernization; using a large body of historical studies, Brigitte proposed that this nuclear family was one of the important causes of modernization.

As a public intellectual, with the wellbeing of children as the guiding principle, she argued that this family type should be favored in the law and by state actions. Needless to say, placing yourself in the middle between opposing armies shooting at each other is not a career-enhancing move. There is a paradox here: Brigitte had no prejudices against homosexuals and supported their freedom to live in accordance with their sexuality, and she did not share the view that bourgeois marriage at best three hundred years old is the only natural or divinely mandated arrangement.

On the other hand, she thought it an illusion that there are no important differences between men and women, or that two men or two women living together is the same as a man and a woman together raising the children they themselves have produced. Brigitte did not hide her views, which she ably defended both in her books and in many articles.

One article of hers, that was not on a battleground in the culture war but still aroused controversy, was one in which she argued that so-called intelligence tests did not measure intelligence at all, but rather the mastery of a modern cognitive style. She was ideologically marginal everywhere she taught especially at Wellesley, then as now a bastion of radical feminism.

Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. Sociology: a biographical approach Bookreader Item Preview. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. Please see your browser settings for this feature. EMBED for wordpress.

Want more? Therefore, much of the empirical work of Berger and Weber have revolved around the relationship between modern rationalization and options for social action. Weber argued that rationalism can mean a variety of things at the subjective level of consciousness and at the objective level of social institutions. The connection between Berger's analysis of the sociology of religion in modern society and Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism aligns.

Weber saw capitalism as a result of the Protestant secularization of work ethic and morality in amassing wealth, which Berger integrates into his analysis about the effects of losing the non-secular foundations for belief about life's ultimate meaning. Berger's own experiences teaching in North Carolina in the s showed the shocking American prejudice of that era's Southern culture and influenced his humanistic perspective as a way to reveal the ideological forces from which it stemmed.

In , he was awarded the Dr. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikiquote Wikidata item. American sociologist — Vienna , Austria. Brookline , Massachusetts , U. Brigitte Kellner. Sociology theology. Sociology of knowledge sociology of religion.

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The social construction of reality [ edit ]. The reality of everyday life [ edit ]. Social reality on two levels [ edit ]. Society as objective and subjective [ edit ]. Levels of socialization [ edit ]. Humanistic perspective [ edit ].

Brigitte berger biography

View of sociology [ edit ]. Religion and society [ edit ]. Religion and the human problems of modernity [ edit ]. Pluralism [ edit ]. Transcendence [ edit ]. Secularization theory [ edit ]. Theoretical contributions [ edit ]. Influences [ edit ]. Honors [ edit ]. Works [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. International Sociological Association.

The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. June A Contemporary Erasmus: Peter L. Modern Age, Vol 53, pp. Sage Publications Inc, , pp. Peter Berger, Dies at 88". Boston University. Retrieved June 28, The American Interest. Retrieved June 27, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Pardee School of Global Studies". Amherst: Prometheus. Open Road Media published ISBN Retrieved 8 October The social stock of knowledge [ Canada: Oxford University Press.

Garden City, New York: Anchor. The world of everyday life is structured both spatially and temporally. Invitation to Sociology: A Humanist Perspective. New York, NY: Doubleday. The Homelessness of the Mind. Facing Up to Modernity. Berger outlines four benefits of pluralism".