To Invite or Not to Invite to Sociology? Thinking about P. Berger`s Critical Essay “Sociology: A Disinvitation?”

Abstract

The authors of an unpublished translation of P.L. Berger's essay, written in the early 1990s and published in the journal “Society” (1992), demonstrate the relevance and surprising timeliness of this work for a wide readership. Sociology sometimes experiences crises and deadlocks in theory and research. Contemporary global events exacerbate these crises, and sometimes it seems that sociology can no longer cope with the study and explanation of new phenomena and processes. From the point of view of the authors, P.L. Berger, while criticizing and lamenting the shortcomings of his contemporary sociological theory and the short-sightedness of sociologists, paradoxically does not disappoint or discourage sociology, but invites once again and more insistently to engage in this science, recalling what the classics of sociology wrote and did.