"Even if one is interested only in one's own society, which is one's prerogative, one can understand that society much better by comparing it with others"
About this Quote
Berger’s line is a polite concession that doubles as a trapdoor. He starts by granting the reader a comfortable escape hatch: it’s fine to care only about “one’s own society.” That “prerogative” flatters parochial instincts and acknowledges the ordinary limits of attention. Then he pivots, quietly insisting that even the self-interested can’t afford cultural isolation. Comparison isn’t presented as moral virtue; it’s presented as better eyesight.
The intent is methodological, but the subtext is political. Berger is pushing against the common belief that a society can be understood from the inside by native intuition alone. The insider feels naturalness; Berger wants to make the natural look strange. Cross-societal comparison punctures the spell of “that’s just how things are” by showing that other places solve the same problems with radically different norms, institutions, and stories. Once you see alternatives, your own society stops feeling inevitable and starts looking like a set of choices, accidents, and power arrangements.
Context matters: Berger’s sociology, shaped by the mid-20th century boom in social science and the Cold War-era fascination with “modernization,” often returned to how knowledge and reality are socially constructed. This sentence sits comfortably in that tradition. It’s an argument for reflexivity without preaching cosmopolitanism: if you want to defend your society, reform it, or even simply navigate it, you need the shock of the foreign as a diagnostic tool. Comparison turns patriotism and critique into the same act: taking your home seriously enough to test it against the world.
The intent is methodological, but the subtext is political. Berger is pushing against the common belief that a society can be understood from the inside by native intuition alone. The insider feels naturalness; Berger wants to make the natural look strange. Cross-societal comparison punctures the spell of “that’s just how things are” by showing that other places solve the same problems with radically different norms, institutions, and stories. Once you see alternatives, your own society stops feeling inevitable and starts looking like a set of choices, accidents, and power arrangements.
Context matters: Berger’s sociology, shaped by the mid-20th century boom in social science and the Cold War-era fascination with “modernization,” often returned to how knowledge and reality are socially constructed. This sentence sits comfortably in that tradition. It’s an argument for reflexivity without preaching cosmopolitanism: if you want to defend your society, reform it, or even simply navigate it, you need the shock of the foreign as a diagnostic tool. Comparison turns patriotism and critique into the same act: taking your home seriously enough to test it against the world.
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| Topic | Knowledge |
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