The concept of anxiety between Max Weber and Peter L. Berger

Abstract

The article aims to discuss how the concept of anxiety acts at the intersection between a certain moment of the work of Peter L. Berger and the central thesis of The protestant ethics, from Max Weber. On the one hand, it seeks to examine how Berger uses this concept in order to analyze the work of social construction of reality and the persistent shadow that accompanies it in the form of a “crisis of meaning”. On the other, it emphasizes how this crisis of meaning, directly linked by Berger to the psychic condition of anxiety, is closely related to the thesis developed by Weber in his best known work, where the ideal-typical modern individual, that is, the Calvinist, is described as an anxious subject precisely because crossed by a failure in his attempt to endow life with a univocal meaning. Finally, in a comparative work, it is analyzed displacements and reformulations that hinder a naive identification between both projects. Thereby, the article brings to light a little-studied chapter of the relationship between phenomenological sociology and Max Weber's theories.