Thomas Luckmann

Thomas Luckmann (October 14, 1927 – May 10, 2016) was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany.

Born in Jesenice, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Luckmann studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and the University of Innsbruck.

Luckmann was born in 1927 in Jesenice, Slovenia which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

He had an Austrian father who was an industrialist, his mother was from a Slovene family from Ljubljana.

On his mother's side, he was the cousin of the Slovene poet Božo Vodušek.

As a kid he was expose to two vastly different cultures, and Luckmann had the advantage of growing up in a bilingual environment speaking both Slovene and German.

He attended Slovene-language schools while in Jesenice until the year 1941, when the occupation of Slovenia during World War II forced him to transfer to Klagenfurt high school in Austria.

Luckmann attended high school in Klagenfurt, after he and his family fled Italian occupation in Ljubljana in 1941.

After escaping being a prisoner of war, Luckmann began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Vienna and Innsbruck.

Later in 1943 he and his mother relocated to Vienna, after the death of his father and several other relatives during World War II.

Living in Austria during this period automatically granted him German citizenship, and in 1944 he was drafted for the army, joining the Luftwaffe where he served as a Luftwaffenhelfer.

Luckmann was transferred to a military hosipital for minor injuries shortly before the end of the war.

Luckmann was in the hospital in Bavaria when the United States liberated the region.

After liberation, in 1945 Luckmann became a prisoner of war and escaped after three months.

He then settled back to Vienna and graduated from "Notmatura."

He then went on and graduated from Notmatura, and from 1948 and on he began studying different subjects in the social science field.

He then moved to the United States with his wife, Benita Petkevic, where he then studied at The New School in New York City.

It was his time at The New College, did Luckmann begin to discern his career as a sociologist.

He was taught by Alfred Scü tz, Dorion Cairns, Albert Salomon, and Carl Meyer, they later became great influence on Luckmann.

This was when he was first introduced to the sociological discipline, and then he got familiarized with Alfred Schü tz’s work on sociological phenomenology.

He went on to meet Peter Berger, where he would later go on to co-author The Social Construction of Reality, which later ended up becoming one of his most notable works.

Together, he and his colleagues produced some of the most influential sociological works of the 20th century.

Luckmann never intended to become a sociologist.

His initial academic interests resided in linguistics, history and philosophy.

At The New School, Luckmann primarily studied philosophy and chose to study sociology as a second subject after admiring how his teachers specialized in these dual subjects.

For example, Luckmann was introduced to the sociology of religion when his teacher at the time, Carl Meyer, asked him to do field work about churches in Germany after World War II.

Captivated by his experience in Germany, Luckmann used his fieldwork to pursue a Ph.D in sociology.

He obtained his first academic position at Hobart College, in Geneva, New York, before returning to teach at The New School after the death of Alfred Schü tz.

He married Benita Petkevic in 1950.

His contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.

In 1950, Luckmann married Benita Petkevic, who was a Latvian-born social scientist who taught in Austria, Germany.

It was said that their marriage was a turning point for his life, among many other factors.

The couple had three daughters Maja, Mara, and Metka.

50th Anniversary Social Construction Thomas Luckmann.

After publishing two books in 1963 and 1966, and several successful essays, Luckmann worked as a professor of Sociology at the University of Konstanz in Germany from 1970 to his retirement, and later professor emeritus.

It is noted that his time in at Konstanz was marked as an intense period of interdisciplinary work, in which he wrote multiple essays concerning communication, linguistics, literature and history.

Luckmann was eventually granted a professorship position at The University of Frankfurt in 1965.

His best-known titles are the 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (co-authored with Peter L. Berger), The Invisible Religion (1967), and The Structures of the Life-World (1973) (co-authored with Alfred Schütz)

On May 10, 2016, Luckmann died of cancer at the age of 88 at his home in Austria.

Luckmann's ideas and theories have been influential within the field in sociology and has had a huge impact on the world and intellectual thought.