“Social structure” is remarkable. We are told in many places that this or that is a “social structure.” So think about gender, race, money. One book that played a central role in the emergence of the concept was Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality. As of today, this work can proudly claim over 90,000 citations in the English version alone. Therefore, its influence within and beyond sociology is enormous.
Additionally, this book contains an interesting genealogy. Berger and Luckmann state in their introduction:[h]“We are very grateful to the late Alfred Schütz.” Schutz attended private seminars with Ludwig von Mises, and his work has an Austrian flavor but an emphasis on action and subjectivity. This makes an interesting observation. Social constructivism shares roots with the Austrian school of thought. Somewhere along the way, however, a fine but crucial distinction became blurred within social constructivist thought.
This decrease in accuracy is believed to have occurred because the slogan “socially constructed” can be misleading. When something is built, it is tempting to assume that there was a builder, an agent, who intentionally planned it and carried it out. A good example of this type of construction is a site where an architect’s construction plans are executed. But for the social phenomenon in question, “constructed” is an ambiguous term at best.
What Berger and Luckmann portray in their work is that “society is a product of humans.” In doing so, it becomes clear how behaviors turn into habits and how habits become institutionalized. Such institutions then existing could be correctly called “socially constructed” if we want to convey that they are “products of humans.” Here we find an unfortunate ambiguity.
To understand this ambiguity, you need to understand what Adam Ferguson said:[n]People do encounter institutions that are the result of human action, but no human design was carried out. ”Thus, there are two different kinds of institutions or institutions: those that are the product of humans and those that are the result of human action.
The first class includes facilities designed by designing minds. If you have a company, a home, or a government, its order can be traced back to the ordering mind. The second class includes organizations that certainly arise from human action but do not result from the directed will of some subject. In these cases of what F.A. Hayek called “spontaneous orders,” order emerges from the way people interact, even though no one designed the orders.
Use of the term “construction” can blur the distinction between the two classes or misinterpret emerging institutions as institutions that are the result of design.
Now, I don’t want to get into a history of ideas debate that evaluates what Berger and Luckmann really meant. Suffice it to say, as Berger said, “Luckman and I have said many times: we are not constructivists.” Rather, what matters is the dangerous implications of the ways in which people today often misunderstand institutions.
These misconceptions have a double meaning. First, people think that most of our institutions are proper buildings designed by someone with a specific purpose. For example, if there are people who are relatively poor and people who are relatively wealthy within these institutions, then those institutions are considered a matter of justice. That is, the existence of such inequality is seen as a choice, and that choice against inequality is often seen as unjust.
But, as Hayek always emphasized, we understand justice as referring to our actions, and these institutions, which no one planned, just fall unnaturally into this category. No one chose or designed this inequality.
Second, it seems to follow that if something is built by someone, it can also be built by another. This means that if you claim that someone in the past built some institution, say our language, it must be true that someone else could probably build that institution as well, even if in a different way—perhaps more consistent with our view of justice. All you need is a design person with the courage to take on the challenge.
However, if such a structure does not exist from the beginning, the system that emerges from interaction may be beyond the ability of any one individual to design it. And trying to do so would be a disaster. At least this is one of Hayek’s main arguments not only against central planning, but also against the explicit design of institutions as the proper domain of cultural evolution. We don’t have some genius chief planner running our economy like the post office. Nor have some generous experts decided that it is best to guide our society toward a culture of progress, hard work, and cooperation, and to set humanity (at least in the Western world) on a trajectory toward this.
Constructivism’s unique insights are valuable. What is needed is clarification, and more often than not, clarity, about what “constructed” means and what it does not mean.
