Social Constructs and Spontaneous Order

“Social construction” is prominent: we are told in various places that this or that is a “social construct”: think of gender, race, or money. One book that played a central role in the emergence of that concept is Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s 1966 The Social Construction of Reality. That work can proudly claim more than 90,000 citations as of today—only in its English version, that is. Its influence within sociology, and then beyond, is thus enormous.

Moreover, the book has an interesting genealogy. In their preface, Berger and Luckmann note “[h]ow much we owe to the late Alfred Schütz.” Schütz participated in Ludwig von Mises’s Privatseminar, and his oeuvre displays a strong focus on action and subjectivity, with an Austrian flavor. This makes for an interesting observation: social constructivism shares roots with Austrian school thinking. Somewhere along the way, however, a fine but crucial distinction has been blurred within social constructivist thought.

This loss in precision presumably occurred because the slogan “socially constructed” can be misleading. When something has been constructed, it’s tempting to assume there has been a constructor, an agent who deliberately made a plan and executed it. A good example of this kind of construction is a site where an architect’s construction plan is executed. But for the social phenomena in question, “constructed” is, at best, an ambivalent term.

What Berger and Luckmann describe in their work is the way in which “Society is a human product.” In doing so, they unfold how action turns into habits and how habits become institutionalized. Such institutions that then exist may properly be called “socially constructed,” if what one wants to convey is that they are a “human product.” This is where we find the unfortunate ambiguity.

To see this ambiguity, one must appreciate Adam Ferguson’s remark that “[n]ations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Thus, there are two different classes of establishments or institutions that are human products and the result of human action. 

The first class contains establishments designed by a designing mind: if there is a firm, a house, or a government, its order is traceable to an ordering mind. The second class contains those institutions that indeed emerge from human action but that didn’t arise from one agent’s directed will. In these cases of what F.A. Hayek terms “spontaneous orders,” an order emerges from the way people interact, even though no one designed that order.

Using the term “construction” can blur the distinction between the two classes, or even mistake emergent institutions for institutions that are the result of design. 

Now, I don’t want to engage in a history-of-ideas discussion that assesses what Berger and Luckmann really meant. Suffice it to say that, as Berger put it, “Luckmann and I have said a number of times: we are not constructivists.” What matters is rather the dangerous implications of the way in which people today often misunderstand institutions.

These misunderstandings are twofold. First, people take most of our institutions to be proper constructions—designed by someone with a specific purpose. If, for example, within these institutions, some people are relatively poor and others relatively rich, the institutions are considered a question of justice: it is seen as a choice that there are such inequalities—and that choice for inequality is often taken to be unjust.

Yet, as Hayek always stressed, we understand justice as referring to our actions, and these institutions that no one planned only awkwardly fall within this category. No one chose or designed this inequality.

Second, if something has been constructed by someone, then it seems to follow that another construction is also possible. This means that if you hold that someone in the past has constructed some institution, e.g., our language, then it should be true that someone else can equally construct that institution, even though in different ways—perhaps more in line with our views of justice. It would only require a designing agent bold enough to try.

Yet if there was no such construction in the first place, the institution that emerged from interaction may be beyond the ability of any one individual to design. And the attempt to do so would spell disaster. That, at least, is one of the chief arguments Hayek put forth, not only against central planning, but also against the explicit design of institutions that are the proper realm of cultural evolution. No genius chief planner runs our economy just like a post office. Nor did some generous expert determine it would be best to steer our societies towards a culture of progress, industriousness, and cooperation and set (at least the Western parts of) humanity on a track towards this.

The original insights of constructivism are valuable. What is needed is setting straight, and more often making explicit, what “constructed” means and does not mean.