“Social construction” is prominent: in various places we are told that this or that is “social construction”: think of gender, race, or money. Another book that played a major role in the emergence of that concept is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1966. The Social Construction of Truth. That work can proudly claim over 90,000 citations as of today—only in its English version, that is. Its influence within human welfare, and beyond, is enormous.
In addition, this book has an interesting genealogy. In their introduction, Berger and Luckmann state “[h]we owe it to the late Alfred Schütz.” Schütz participated in the Privatseminar of Ludwig von Mises, and his work shows a strong focus on action and subjectivity, with an Austrian flavor. This makes an interesting observation: social constructivism shares its roots with the thinking of the Austrian school. Somewhere, however, this fine but important distinction has been blurred in social constructivist thought.
This loss of precision is possible because the slogan “socially constructed” can be misleading. When something is built, it’s tempting to think that there was a builder, an agent who purposely made a plan and carried it out. A good example of this type of construction is a site where an architect’s building plan is made. But in the social context in question, “construction” is a vague term.
What Berger and Luckmann describe in their work is how “society is the product of man.” In doing so, they reveal how action becomes habits and how habits become institutions. Such institutions as exist at that time may be called “socially constructed,” if what one means is “man-made.” This is where we get the ambiguity.
To see this ambiguity, one has to appreciate Adam Ferguson’s comment that “[n]Nations stumble upon institutions, which are the result of human action, but not the making of any human design..” Thus, there are two different categories of institutions or institutions that are the products of people and the result of human action.
The first class consists of institutions designed by the creative mind: if there is a firm, a house, or a government, its organization is traceable to the organized mind. The second category consists of those institutions which actually arise from human actions but which do not arise from the directed will of a single agent. In these cases of what FA Hayek called “spontaneous orders,” order emerges from the way people interact, even though no one designed that order.
Using the word “construction” can blur the distinction between these two categories, or mistake the emerging institutions for the institutions that are the result of design.
Now, I don’t want to engage in a theoretical discussion of what exactly Berger and Luckmann meant. Suffice it to say that, as Berger says, “Luckmann and I have said many times: we are not construction promoters.” More important than that are the harmful effects of the way people today often misunderstand institutions.
This disagreement is twofold. First, people consider most of our institutions to be proper structures—designed by someone with a purpose. If, for example, within these institutions, some people are relatively poor and others are rich, the institutions are considered a question of justice: it is considered a choice that such inequality exists—and that choice of inequality is often considered wrong.
However, as Hayek always insists, we understand that justice refers to our actions, and these institutions that no one has organized in an improper way fall into this category. No one chose or designed this inequality.
Second, if something has been created by someone, it seems to follow that other creations are also possible. This means that if you believe that someone once created a certain institution, for example, our language, it must be true that another person can equally create that institution, although in different ways—perhaps in accordance with our ideas about justice. It will only take a design agent who is brave enough to try.
But if there was no such construction in the first place, the institution that emerged from the interaction might be beyond the power of any one person to design. And an attempt to do so would spell disaster. That, at least, is one of the main arguments that Hayek puts forward, not only against central planning, but also against the clear design of institutions that are the proper sphere of cultural evolution. There is no master planner running our economy like the post office. And some generous expert did not decide that it would be very good to direct our societies to a culture of progress, diligence, and cooperation and set (at least parts of the West) humanity on the path towards this.
The first ideas of constructivism are important. What is needed is guidance, and often clarification of what “building” means and does not mean.
