Explain in detail the following quote from Berger and Luckmann: “only with the transmission of the social world to a new generation…does the fundamental social dialectic appear in the totality. To repeat, only with the appearance of a new generation can one properly speak of a social world.”

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Externalization and objectivation enable the actor to confront the social world as something outside of herself. Berger and Luckmann (1966:58) emphasize that institutions are “experienced as possessing a reality of their own, a reality that confronts the individual as an external and coercive fact.” Internalization is “the immediate apprehension or interpretation of an objective event as expressing meaning” (1966:129), that is, the process through which individual subjectivity is attained. Internalization means that “the objectivated social world is retrojected into consciousness in the course of socialization” (ibid.:61). The three moments of externalization, objectivation, and internalization are not to be understood “as occurring in a temporal sequence,” but rather as a simultaneous, dialectical process. Nevertheless, it is in intergenerational transmission that the process of internalization is complete. In other words, every individual is born into an environment within which she encounters the significant others who are in charge of her socialization. One does not choose one’s own significant others; rather, they are imposed on her. In the process of socialization, the stocks of knowledge that the individual experiences as a preexisting objective reality are imposed on her. The individual is thereby “born into not only an objective social structure but also an objective social world” (1966:131). Berger and Luckmann differentiate two types of socialization based on the extent to which individuals are active and conscious of the process of internalization. Primary socialization refers to “the first socialization an individual undergoes in childhood, through which he becomes a member of society” (1966:130–1). On the other hand, secondary socialization refers to subsequent processes of socialization that induct “an already socialized individual into new sectors of the objective world of his society” (ibid.).