Summary Of The Social Foundations Of Human Experience

Critical Analysis of “The social foundations of human experience” The academic essay, “The Social Foundations of Human Experience”, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann written in 1966 is an interesting take on the socialization of human beings. It provides a myriad of information and ideas promoting readers to think about how socialization, as well as social structures effect both society and individual beings. The authors argue that human beings experience life based on the socialization process and their innate abilities to interact with each other. Society operates in a distinct way, based on human activity and human interaction. Through examining our course content and reading the essay I have found that the Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann

Berger and Luckmann go into great detail about social order being a human product (Page 10). They explain that social order does not have biological roots, rather it was designed because of human activity. This caused me to think about how social order is involved in today’s society. Without social order, life would be upside down as we know it today, as laws would not be in place, social institutions would not be operating and human beings would likely live more like the current animal kingdom. However, human beings have caused society to have social order based on their own activities throughout history. This idea also caused me to think about our course content and the three main ideas of symbolic interactionism, specifically number three. “The meanings of things are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process used by the person dealing with things he encounters” (Lajoie, 2016). This sentence represents social order, as human beings act and react based on situations they encounter, creating a need for social order. Social order is always changing as human beings

I agree with most of what they are saying, however, they do not back it up with many facts, in terms of quantitative data. For example, there are several occasions Berger and Luckmann make a statement that sounds relatively accurate, however the essay does not state any examples as to how or why this statement is accurate. For example, the statement “(People do) have drives, of course. But these drives are highly unspecialized and undirected” (1966, Page 10). This statement is vague, and quantitative data would help to back it up and make it seem more credible. Some of the information is also fairly common sense. For example, as they talk about how lower class children and upper class children see the world quite differently (Page 11). That statement is quite obvious as children of the upper class will have quite different realities than those children who come from lower class families. This means their socialization process will be different, therefore they will be dissimilar in more ways than those of the same socio-economic status. These flaws in the essay are minor, but still