Durkheim és a „valóság társadalmi felépítése”
Durkheim and the „social construction of reality”

Summary/Abstract: In recent decades Émile Durkheim has taken his rightful position among the classical figures of the sociology of knowledge, and thanks to scholars interested in the social formation of knowledge, but resistant to the heritage of the Geisteswissenschaften, his thought has received renewed attention. However, the mediated but significant Durkheimian influence, which by being filtered through „social constructivism” strongly affects the ideas of the current mainstream of the sociology of knowledge, has so far escaped attention. In their The Social Construction of Reality, a book which became a truly classical work in the last half century, and is known by the widest audience of the social sciences, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann formulated an alternative programme for the sociology of knowledge referring mostly to the thought of Alfred Schütz, proposed as an unwary synthesis of the Weberian and Durkheimian approaches. Contrary to the received view, the authors, both strongly influenced by Durkheim in their individual work, made theoretical decisions in opposition to Schützian principles on some important points, and their offer is another image depicting the successfully integrated society, formulated against Talcott Parsons, whom they challenged on his own grounds. It is no exaggeration to consider the contents of their deservedly successful book as a reformulation of the sociology of knowledge. It is however false to consider the conception, influenced at least as strongly by Durkheim and Mead as by Schütz, as „the phenomenological sociological” proposal for a sociology of knowledge. Although they collected and developed most of Schütz’s fragmented remarks relevant for the sociology of knowledge with great success, they missed the opportunity to extract the alternative of the sociology of knowledge contained in some of Schütz’s unfinished manuscripts, which by marking the boundaries delimiting subjectivity from the sociology of knowledge and fostering a phenomenologically fortified consistent form of methodological individualism could serve as a safeguard against the specific problems of collectivistic and objectivistic theoretical strategies.

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