Peter Berger's _Invitation to Sociology_

C. Wright Mills' _The Sociological Imagination_ was my first encounter with Sociology. Encounter is not quite the right word. Even though I did not quite grasp many of the allusions - not even "grand theory" - it was a life-changing text in many senses of the term. Soon after, somebody recommended Peter L. Berger's _Invitation to Sociology_. The decision to pursue Sociology, made after reading Mills, was now sealed. Naively imagining that the dominant core of sociology would be along the lines suggested by Mills, Berger and Goffman, I was naturally shocked to encounter the widespread methodological fetishism for quantification in the discipline. While pursuing and, successfully completing a degree in biology and physics, I was (at that time!) quite familiar with statistics and even appreciated its relevance and importance for making sense of some of the issues addressed by sociologists. But I was not mentally prepared for what I encountered. But then again, there was always the insightful writings of a David Riesman and a Daniel Bell among others....

As Berger put it:

"The prominence of statistical techniques in American sociology today has, then, certain ritual functions that are readily understandable in view of the power system within which most sociologists have to make a career. In fact, most sociologists have little more than a cookbook knowledge of statistics, treating it with about the same mixture of awe, ignorance and timid manipulation as a poor village priest would the mighty Latin cadences of Thomist theology. Once one has realized these things, however, it should be clear that sociology ought not to judged by these aberrations...it is quite true that some sociologists, especially in America, have become so preoccupied with methodological questions that they have ceased to be interested in society at all" (pp. 11-13)

From Berger's _Invitation to Sociology_ (1963)

Given his keen interpretive acumen and sociological insights, it is difficult to believe that the same author penned the bizarre _The Capitalist Revolution_ (1986).