Alfred Schütz
Encyclopedia
Alfred Schütz was an Austrian social scientist
, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology, and who is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century.
, studied law in Vienna
, worked as an international lawyer for Reitler and Company, and moved to the United States
in 1939, where he became a member of the faculty of The New School
. He worked on phenomenology
, social science methodology and the philosophy
of Edmund Husserl
, William James
and others.
. He was strongly influenced by Ludwig von Mises
, Henri Bergson
, William James
, and Edmund Husserl
. Contrary to common belief, George Herbert Mead
- whose 'concern with the analysis of meaning in social interaction paralleled that of Schutz, although it had been arrived at by a completely different road' - was of little importance for Schutz, who was very critical of his behavioristic approach
and his inadequate treatment of the problem of social action. Although Schütz was never a student of Husserl, he, together with a colleague, Felix Kaufmann
, studied Husserl's work intensively in seeking a basis for interpretive sociology derived from the work of Max Weber
. This work and its continuation resulted in 1932 in his first book, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (literally, The meaningful construction of the social world, but published in English as The phenomenology of the social world). The publication brought him to the attention of Husserl, whom he 'frequently thereafter visited'; but 'although he corresponded with Husserl until the latter's death [in 1938], he was unable for personal reasons to accept the offer to become his assistant' at Freiburg University.
Schütz's writings had a lasting impact on sociology, both on phenomenological approaches to sociology
(especially through the work of Thomas Luckmann
and Peter L. Berger
) and in ethnomethodology
through the writings of Harold Garfinkel
.
Schütz is probably unique as a scholar of the social sciences in that he pursued a career as a lawyer
for an Austrian banking firm for almost his entire life, teaching part-time at the New School for Social Research in New York
and producing key papers in phenomenological sociology that fill three volumes (published by Nijhoff, The Hague).
, "phenomenology's spokesman of the Lebenswelt"...the mundane lifeworld
', which he divided into four distinct subworlds in what has been called 'the crux of Schutz's theoretical contribution. He believes that our social experience makes up a vast world...distinguish[d] between directly experienced social reality and a social reality lying beyond the horizon of direct experience'. The former consisted of the Umwelt of what Schutz termed "consociates" or "fellow-men" - of the man who 'shares with me a community of space and a community of time'.
By contrast, 'those who I am not directly perceiving fall into three classes. First comes the world of my contemporaries (Mitwelt), then the world of my predecessors (Vorwelt), and finally the world of my successors (Folgewelt)'. The last two represent the past and the future, whereas one's contemporaries share a community of time, if not space, and 'are distinguished from the other two by the fact that it is in principle possible for them to become my consociates'.
Schutz was interested in mapping 'the transition from direct to indirect experience...as two poles between which stretches a continuous series of experiences', as well as in what he called the progressive anonymisation of the Mitwelt: a 'scale of increasing anonymity. There is, for instance, my absent friend, his brother whom he has described to me, the professor whose books I have read, the postal clerk, the Canadian Parliament, abstract entities like Canada herself, the rules of English grammar, or the basic principles of jurisprudence'. For Schutz, 'the further out we go into the world of contemporaries, the more anonymous its inhabitants become', ending with the most anonymous of all - 'artifacts of any kind which bear witness to the subjective meaning-context of some unknown person', but nothing more.
In his later writings, Schutz explored the way that 'in social situations of everyday life relations pertaining to all these dimensions are frequently intertwined...in various degrees of anonymity'. Thus for instance, 'if in a face-to-face relationship with a friend I discuss a magazine article dealing with the attitude of the President and Congress toward...China...I am in a relationship not only with the perhaps anonymous contemporary writer of the article but also with the contemporary individual or collective actors on the social scene designated by the terms "President", "Congress", "China"'.
Social Scientist
Social Scientist is a New Delhi based journal in social sciences and humanities published since 1972....
, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology, and who is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century.
Life
Schütz was born in AustriaAustria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
, studied law in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, worked as an international lawyer for Reitler and Company, and moved to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1939, where he became a member of the faculty of The New School
The New School
The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...
. He worked on phenomenology
Phenomenology (psychology)
Phenomenology is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl. Early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty conducted their own psychological investigations in the early 20th century...
, social science methodology and the philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
, William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
and others.
Work
Schutz's principal task was to create a philosophical foundation for the social sciencesSocial sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
. He was strongly influenced by Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian economist, philosopher, and classical liberal who had a significant influence on the modern Libertarian movement and the "Austrian School" of economic thought.-Biography:-Early life:...
, Henri Bergson
Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize...
, William James
William James
William James was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism...
, and Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
. Contrary to common belief, George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
- whose 'concern with the analysis of meaning in social interaction paralleled that of Schutz, although it had been arrived at by a completely different road' - was of little importance for Schutz, who was very critical of his behavioristic approach
Behaviorism
Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...
and his inadequate treatment of the problem of social action. Although Schütz was never a student of Husserl, he, together with a colleague, Felix Kaufmann
Felix Kaufmann
Felix Kaufmann was an Austrian-American philosopher of law.Kaufmann studied jurisprudence and philosophy in Vienna. From 1922 to 1938 he was a Privatdozent there. During this time Kaufmann was associated with the Vienna Circle...
, studied Husserl's work intensively in seeking a basis for interpretive sociology derived from the work of Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
. This work and its continuation resulted in 1932 in his first book, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (literally, The meaningful construction of the social world, but published in English as The phenomenology of the social world). The publication brought him to the attention of Husserl, whom he 'frequently thereafter visited'; but 'although he corresponded with Husserl until the latter's death [in 1938], he was unable for personal reasons to accept the offer to become his assistant' at Freiburg University.
Schütz's writings had a lasting impact on sociology, both on phenomenological approaches to sociology
Phenomenological Sociology
Phenomenological Sociology is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness. The object of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the Lebenswelt, or...
(especially through the work of Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann
Thomas Luckmann is a German sociologist of Slovene origin. His main areas of research are the sociology of communication, Sociology of knowledge, sociology of religion, and the philosophy of science.- Biography :...
and Peter L. Berger
Peter L. Berger
Peter Ludwig Berger is an Austrian-born American sociologist well known for his work, co-authored with Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge .-Biography:...
) and in ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology
Ethnomethodology is an ethnographic approach to sociological inquiry introduced by the American sociologist Harold Garfinkel . Ethnomethodology's research interest is the study of the everyday methods people use for the production of social order...
through the writings of Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology.-Biography:...
.
Schütz is probably unique as a scholar of the social sciences in that he pursued a career as a lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
for an Austrian banking firm for almost his entire life, teaching part-time at the New School for Social Research in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
and producing key papers in phenomenological sociology that fill three volumes (published by Nijhoff, The Hague).
The four divisions of the lifeworld
'Schutz is, according to NatansonMaurice Natanson
Maurice Alexander Natanson was an American philosopher "who helped introduce the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl in the United States" He was a student of Alfred Schutz at the New School for Social Research and helped popularize Schutz' work from the 1960s onward.During his career he...
, "phenomenology's spokesman of the Lebenswelt"...the mundane lifeworld
Lifeworld
Lifeworld may be conceived as a universe of what is self-evident or given, a world that subjects may experience together. For Husserl, the lifeworld is the fundament for all epistemological enquiries. The concept has its origin in biology and cultural Protestantism.The lifeworld concept is used in...
', which he divided into four distinct subworlds in what has been called 'the crux of Schutz's theoretical contribution. He believes that our social experience makes up a vast world...distinguish[d] between directly experienced social reality and a social reality lying beyond the horizon of direct experience'. The former consisted of the Umwelt of what Schutz termed "consociates" or "fellow-men" - of the man who 'shares with me a community of space and a community of time'.
By contrast, 'those who I am not directly perceiving fall into three classes. First comes the world of my contemporaries (Mitwelt), then the world of my predecessors (Vorwelt), and finally the world of my successors (Folgewelt)'. The last two represent the past and the future, whereas one's contemporaries share a community of time, if not space, and 'are distinguished from the other two by the fact that it is in principle possible for them to become my consociates'.
Schutz was interested in mapping 'the transition from direct to indirect experience...as two poles between which stretches a continuous series of experiences', as well as in what he called the progressive anonymisation of the Mitwelt: a 'scale of increasing anonymity. There is, for instance, my absent friend, his brother whom he has described to me, the professor whose books I have read, the postal clerk, the Canadian Parliament, abstract entities like Canada herself, the rules of English grammar, or the basic principles of jurisprudence'. For Schutz, 'the further out we go into the world of contemporaries, the more anonymous its inhabitants become', ending with the most anonymous of all - 'artifacts of any kind which bear witness to the subjective meaning-context of some unknown person', but nothing more.
In his later writings, Schutz explored the way that 'in social situations of everyday life relations pertaining to all these dimensions are frequently intertwined...in various degrees of anonymity'. Thus for instance, 'if in a face-to-face relationship with a friend I discuss a magazine article dealing with the attitude of the President and Congress toward...China...I am in a relationship not only with the perhaps anonymous contemporary writer of the article but also with the contemporary individual or collective actors on the social scene designated by the terms "President", "Congress", "China"'.
Biographies
- Wagner, H. R. (1983). Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.
- Barber, M. (2004). The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz. New York, State University of New York Press.
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyStanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a freely-accessible online encyclopedia of philosophy maintained by Stanford University. Each entry is written and maintained by an expert in the field, including professors from over 65 academic institutions worldwide...
, " Alfred Schütz," by Michael Barber - Alfred Schutz Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
- Schutzian Research - A Yearbook of Mundane Phenomenology and Qualitative Social Science.
- Bibliography of Secondary Sources on Alfred Schütz, 1932-1998.
- The Alfred Schütz Archive.
- Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences.
- Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.