Luckmann, Thomas (b. 1927)

Thomas Luckmann was born in Slovenia and was educated at the universities of Vienna and Innsbruck in Austria and at the New School for Social Research in the United States. A professor of sociology, he has taught in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (New York) and at the University of Constance, Germany (among other institutions). His work focuses mainly on social theory with significant implications for the sociology of religion and also for philosophy and sociology in general.

Luckmann is widely viewed as an interesting figure in the historical trajectory of secularization theory, not the least for his markedly open-ended, functional definition of religion. In his The Invisible Religion (1967; originally published in 1963 in German as Das problem der Religion), Luckmann defines religion as a “transcendence of biological nature by the human organism” (p. 49), the process by which humans create a meaningful world for themselves. The breadth of the definition renders secularism more or less impossible, but Luckmann distinguishes between religion as a human constant, on the one hand, and organized, social forms of institution-related religion, on the other, allowing for the serious decline of the latter in modern societies. Luckmann's definition of religion has exposed him to a string of criticisms. These include the assessment that the definition leads to excessive conceptual confusion, which cannot be resolved through empirical study, and that it bears relevance for individualistic forms of religion but is unable to account for more collective forms of religion and is thus of limited applicability beyond certain parts of the West.

At the same time, Luckmann is lauded by some scholars for firmly embedding the study of religion in wider social theory by locating religion centrally in the debate on the position of the self in modern society. The trend is continued with The Social Construction of Reality, cowritten with Peter Berger, where religion appears as one element of the construction of reality (the book was published directly in English in 1966 and is thus often mistaken to have preceded Luckmann's thinking in The Invisible Religion). According to its authors, The Social Construction of Reality was intended as a systematic, theoretical treatise in the sociology of knowledge. The book was critical as a move away from the sociology of the 1950s and 1960s, which saw religion and religious values as central to the social order in place. The Social Construction of Reality proclaimed that the social order is not “in place” but is constructed by individuals, or groups of individuals, as part of their own constructions (and maintenance) of their definitions of reality; religion enters the process here.

Luckmann delved further in-depth with these themes in The Structures of the Life World, cōauthored with the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz, under whom he had studied at the New School of Social Research (1973; a second volume appeared in English in 1989, and both were published posthumously for Schütz). Here, the elementary structures of everyday life were examined as the underpinnings of social experience, language, and social action and, by extension, of the history of humankind. Some of Luckmann's other influential texts are listed in the Further Readings.

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