Alfred Schutz

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Alfred Schutz

1899–1959

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Everyday life rests on a huge store of taken-for-granted knowledge and types, and sociology must understand how people make sense of their world.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · Western Europe · Society & History, Epistemology, Mind & Consciousness

Banker by day and philosopher by night: he joined Husserl’s phenomenology to Weber’s interpretive sociology and described the everyday life-world we take for granted.

Key ideas

Life-world and natural attitude
Typification
Multiple realities
The stranger

Students: Thomas Luckmann, Peter L. Berger

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Influence

Influenced by 4

William James

influenced by
Schutz reworked James’s sub-universes of reality into ‘finite provinces of meaning’, with the everyday world of working as paramount reality (‘On Multiple Realities’, 1945). A. Schutz, “On Multiple Realities”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5 (1945); W. James, The Principles of Psychology (1890); SEP “Alfred Schutz”
Evidence: AI draft
William James › 1842–1910
Henri Bergson

influenced by
Schutz grounded meaning in Bergson’s inner duration: lived experience becomes meaningful when a reflective glance turns back on it (Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt, 1932). A. Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932); Theorie der Lebensformen (manuscripts 1925–27, ed. I. Srubar, 1981); SEP “Alfred Schutz”
Evidence: AI draft
Henri Bergson › 1859–1941
Edmund Husserl

influenced by
Schutz used Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology to clarify Weber’s ‘subjective meaning’, describing how meaning is built up in consciousness and how we understand others; Husserl admired the book (1932). A. Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932); SEP “Alfred Schutz”; SEP “Edmund Husserl”
Evidence: AI draft
Edmund Husserl › 1859–1938
Max Weber

influenced by ✓
Schutz took up Weber’s demand that sociology understand the subjective meaning of action and asked what that meaning is, a question he found Weber had left unexamined (1932). A. Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932); SEP “Alfred Schutz”; SEP “Max Weber”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Max Weber › 1864–1920

Influenced 7

Harold Garfinkel

influenced
Garfinkel turned Schutz’s common-sense knowledge into an empirical topic, using breaching experiments to expose the background expectancies of everyday life (Studies in Ethnomethodology, 1967). H. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967); J. Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (1984); SEP “Alfred Schutz”
Evidence: AI draft
Harold Garfinkel › 1917–2011
Erving Goffman

influenced
In Frame Analysis (1974) Goffman built on Schutz’s finite provinces of meaning, after James, but shifted from consciousness to the frames that organise definitions of situations. E. Goffman, Frame Analysis (1974); A. Schutz, “On Multiple Realities” (1945); SEP “Alfred Schutz”
Evidence: AI draft
Erving Goffman › 1922–1982
Dorothy E. Smith

influenced
Smith built on Schutz’s phenomenology of the everyday world but held that its order is organised extra-locally, by texts and relations of ruling (1987). D. E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (1987); “Women’s Perspective as a Radical Critique of Sociology”, Sociological Inquiry 44 (1974)
Evidence: AI draft
Dorothy E. Smith › 1926–2022
Thomas Luckmann taught

taught ✓
Luckmann studied at the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1950s and attended Schutz’s courses; after Schutz’s death he completed Strukturen der Lebenswelt from his drafts (1975/1984). A. Schütz & T. Luckmann, Strukturen der Lebenswelt I (1975), preface
Evidence: AI draft
Thomas Luckmann › 1927–2016
Peter L. Berger taught

taught
Berger studied at the New School for Social Research in New York (MA 1950, PhD 1954), where he attended the courses of Schutz, who taught there. P. L. Berger, Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist (2011)
Evidence: AI draft
Peter L. Berger › 1929–2017
Jürgen Habermas

influenced
Habermas developed his concept of the lifeworld, the shared background of communication, in critical dialogue with Husserl, Schutz and Luckmann (Theory of Communicative Action, 1981). J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981), vol. II; A. Schutz and T. Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World (1973)
Evidence: AI draft
Jürgen Habermas › 1929–2026
Anthony Giddens

influenced ✓
Giddens took up Schutz’s stocks of knowledge as actors’ ‘mutual knowledge’ but objected that Schutz neglected power and unintended consequences of action (New Rules of Sociological Method, 1976). A. Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method (1976); The Constitution of Society (1984); SEP “Alfred Schutz”
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Anthony Giddens › b. 1938

Works

1932The Phenomenology of the Social World
Grounds Weber’s interpretive sociology in Husserl’s phenomenology: how in the everyday life-world we understand what others mean.

Position

Schutz took up Max Weber’s demand that sociology understand the subjective meaning of action and asked what this “meaning” actually is – a question Weber had left unexamined. Drawing on Husserl’s phenomenology and Bergson’s analysis of inner time, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932) describes how meaning is built up in the stream of experience and how we understand other people. Its central idea is the life-world: the everyday reality we inhabit in the “natural attitude”, without doubting that the world exists and that others experience it much as we do. We cope with it through a “stock of knowledge at hand” made of typifications – the postman, the bus, a greeting – most of which we have learned from others. Schutz distinguished “in-order-to” motives from “because” motives, and the consociates we meet face to face from contemporaries known only as types. Essays such as “The Stranger” (1944) and “On Multiple Realities” (1945) applied these ideas. Through Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) and Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, his work shaped much of later sociology.

Life & context

Alfred Schutz (Schütz) was born in Vienna in 1899. After serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War he studied law and social science at the University of Vienna under Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises. All his life he earned his living as a legal and financial adviser in banking, at first for the Vienna firm Reitler & Co. His only book published in his lifetime, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932), won Husserl’s admiration. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938 he happened to be in Paris on business; in 1939 the family emigrated to the United States. From 1943 he taught sociology and philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, while continuing his banking work. He died in New York in 1959.