Peter Berger: The Role Of Social Controls In Society

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The article examines the need for various social controls in a society, for the society itself not to fall apart. Peter Berger believed that by using Social control it could bring its recalcitrant members back into line. He believed that all groups no matter how small needed social controls to survive. He explores three areas of control political and legal controls, economics pressures, and ostracism. With the Political and legal controls the ultimate and, no doubt, the oldest means of social control is physical violence. In the politely operated societies of modern democracies the ultimate argument is violence. With economic pressure, few means of coercion are as effective as those that threaten one’s livelihood or profit. Both management and labor effectively use this threat as an instrumentality of control in our society. But economic means of control are just as effective outside the institutions properly called the economy. A good example of an economic sanction would be for a minister. It may not be actually illegal for a minister to seduce his …show more content…

The sanctions of society are able at each moment of existence to isolate us among our fellow men, to subject us to ridicule, to deprive us of our sustenance and our liberty, and in the last resort to deprive us of life itself. The law and the morality of society can produce elaborate justifications for each one of these sanctions, and most of our fellow men will approve if they are used against us in punishment for our deviance. Finally, we are located in society not only in space but in time. Our society is a historical entity that extends temporally beyond any individual biography. Society antedates us and it will survive us. It was there before we were born and it will be there after we are dead. He believed that society’s history of social control shapes us as individuals and our society and the things we encounter in today’s society will shape our future

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