《现实的社会建构》是知识社会学的经典之作，也是社会建构论的扛鼎之作，更是社会学领域影响较大的著作之一。该书不仅将知识社会学的考察范围，从少数人关心的科学和理论知识，拓展到一般人在日常生活中用以指导行动的知识，而且以生动的笔法，揭示了作为“客观现实”和“主观现实”的社会，到底是如何构成的，又具有怎样的特性。
本书融汇了现象学的洞察与人文主义的关怀。对于矫治社会学理论的退缩，该书至今仍有警示和启迪作用。
本书出版于1967年，是社会学领域的一本经典，是一本与库恩的《科学革命的结构》、韦伯的《新教伦理与资本主义精神》、涂尔干的《自杀论》齐名的社会学经典。本书的问世，开启了社会科学领域一个跨学科的学派——社会建构主义。

Architecture, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, has suspended historical references in favor of universalized abstraction. In the decades after the Second World War, when architectural historians began to assess the legacy of the avant-gardes in order to construct a coherent narrative of modernism's development, they were inevitably influenced by contemporary concerns. In Histories of the Immediate Present, Anthony Vidler examines the work of four historians of architectural modernism and the ways in which their histories were constructed as more or less overt programs for the theory and practice of design in a contemporary context. Vidler looks at the historical approaches of Emil Kaufmann, Colin Rowe, Reyner Banham, and Manfredo Tafuri, and the specific versions of modernism advanced by their historical narratives. Vidler shows that the modernism conceived by Kaufmann was, like the late Enlightenment projects he revered, one of pure, geometrical forms and elemental composition; that of Rowe saw mannerist ambiguity and complexity in contemporary design; Banham's modernism took its cue from the aspirations of the futurists; and the "Renaissance modernism" of Tafuri found its source in the division between the technical experimentation of Brunelleschi and the cultural nostalgia of Alberti. Vidler's investigation demonstrates the inevitable collusion between history and design that pervades all modern architectural discourse--and has given rise to some of the most interesting architectual experiments of the postwar period. Anthony Vidler is Dean and Professor of the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, New York. He is the author of Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000), The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992), both published by The MIT Press, and other books.