# Quote — Peter Berger, The Social Construction of Reality

> The individual... is not born a member of society. He is born with a predisposition towards sociality, and he becomes a member of society. In the life of every individual, therefore, there is a temporal sequence, in the course of which he is inducted into participation in the societal dialectic. The beginning point of this process is internalization : the immediate apprehension or interpretation of an objective event as expressing meaning, that is, as a manifestation of another's subjective processes which thereby becomes subjectively meaningful to myself.

- Author: [Peter Berger](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-berger.md)
- Book: [The Social Construction of Reality](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-berger/the-social-construction-of-reality.md)
- Page: 129
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_L._Berger#The_Social_Construction_of_Reality,_1966) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-berger/the-social-construction-of-reality/the-individual-is-not

## More from this book

> A society’s stock of knowledge is structured in terms of what is generally relevant and what is relevant only to specific roles… the social distribution of knowledge entails a dichotomization in terms of general and role-specific relevance… because of the division of labor, role-specific knowledge will grow at a faster rate than generally relevant and accessible knowledge… The increasing number and complexity of [the resulting] sub universes [of specialized knowledge] make them increasingly inaccessible to outsiders.

p. 77 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-berger/the-social-construction-of-reality/a-societys-stock.md)

> Specific procedures of universe-maintenance become necessary when the symbolic universe has become a problem. As long as this is not the case, the symbolic universe is self-maintaining, that is, self-legitimating by the sheer facticity of its objective existence in the society in question.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-berger/the-social-construction-of-reality/specific-procedures-of-universe-maintenance.md)

> Modern science is an extreme step in this development, and in the secularization and sophistication of universe-maintenance.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/peter-berger/the-social-construction-of-reality/modern-science-is-an-extreme.md)
