29 Facts About Thomas Luckmann

Thomas Luckmann was an American-Austrian sociologist of German and Slovene origin who taught mainly in Germany.

Thomas Luckmann's contributions were central to studies in sociology of communication, sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.

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

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

Thomas Luckmann 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.

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

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

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

Thomas Luckmann moved to the United States in 1950 with his wife, Benita Petkevic, where he then studied at The New School in New York City.

At The New School, Thomas Luckmann began to discern his career as a sociologist.

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

Thomas Luckmann 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.

At The New School, Thomas Luckmann primarily studied philosophy and chose to study sociology as a second subject, influenced by the professors there.

For example, Thomas 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.

Thomas Luckmann 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 Schutz.

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

In 1950, Thomas Luckmann married Benita Petkevic, who was a Latvian-born socialogist who taught in the United States and Germany.

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

Thomas Luckmann worked as a chauffeur and his wife, Benita, worked as a typist when they first moved to New York.

Thomas Luckmann was a follower of the phenomenologically oriented school of sociology, established by the Austrian American scholar Alfred Schutz.

Thomas Luckmann contributed to the foundation of phenomenological sociology, the sociology of religion in modern societies, and the sociology of knowledge and communication.

Thomas Luckmann proposes that there are four derivative types of religion.

Thomas Luckmann offers a comprehensive view on society as symbolic order and ordering, including levels and actors' agencies, and the interplay between both.

Thomas Luckmann continued this analysis of social action, and in 1982 he continued the work of Alfred Schutz, drawing on Schutz's notes and unfinished manuscripts to complete Structures of the Life-World, published in 1982.

Thomas Luckmann then built upon Schutz's analysis and published, Theory of Social Action in 1992.

Together with Richard Grathoff and Walter M Sprondel, Luckmann founded the Social Science Archive Konstanz.

In 2004 Thomas Luckmann became an honorary member of the Slovenian Sociological Association.

The German Sociological Association awarded him a prize for his outstanding lifetime contribution to sociology at its 2002 Congress, and Thomas Luckmann became an honorary member in 2016.

The original Thomas Luckmann Papers are deposited in the Social Science Archive Konstanz.