Alfred Schutz (1899—1959)

Alfred Schutz philosophized about social science in a broad
signification of the word. He was deeply respectful of actual
scientific practice, and produced a classification of the sciences;
explicated methodological postulates for empirical science in general
and the social sciences specifically; and clarified basic concepts for
interpretative sociology in particular. His work shows how philosophy
of the cultural sciences can be done phenomenologically.

1. Life and Works

Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna in 1899. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein and
Karl Popper, and Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, and Franz Brentano
before them, he came from the last phase of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. He was an only child in an upper-middle-class Austrian Jewish
family and had a strong mother. In his youth he attended a classical
Gymnasium in Vienna and developed a lifelong interest in music. After
his serving in World War I, he received his doctorate in the
philosophy of law at Vienna under Hans Kelsen in three years; studied
marginal-utility economics; and became interested in the
interpretative (verstehende) sociology of Max Weber. His initial
attempt to ground the social sciences in the philosophy of Henri
Bergson not proving satisfactory, he was led late in the 1920s by his
friend Felix Kaufmann to study Edmund Husserl's Vorlesungen zur
Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstsein (1928) and Formale und
transzendentale Logik (1929) and, on that basis, committed himself to
phenomenology for the rest of his life.

Schutz completed Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt in 1932. On
the recommendation of Tomoo Otaka as well as Kaufmann, he sent a copy
to Husserl, who invited him to Freiburg and soon asked him to become
his assistant. It was necessary, however, for Schutz to continue his
career as a banking executive in order to support his family. Husserl
called him an executive by day and a phenomenologist by night. He
visited Husserl often until the latter's death in 1938 and continued
to write essays, especially in the philosophy of economics. After the
Nazi Anschluss, he helped many others flee the Nazis; he himself moved
first to Paris and then to New York, where he continued to work in a
private banking firm. Soon he also began teaching sociology and
eventually philosophy in the evenings at the Graduate Faculty of
Political and Social Science of the New School for Social Research.
His correspondence with Aron Gurwitsch well documents his thinking
from 1939 until 1959, when he died. Schutz published dozens of essays
in the United States and began working toward a second book during his
last decade. Before his death, however, he was only able to outline an
arrangement of passages from various essays, eventually fleshed out by
Thomas Luckmann in two volumes. But Schutz had also managed to plan
several volumes of Collected Papers that his widow and two other
students quickly edited after his death. Moreover, translations of the
Aufbau into English as well as it and volumes of papers into a number
of Western and Asian languages began in the 1960s. His quite
extensive, international, and multidisciplinary influence is still
growing within and beyond philosophy. His oeuvre also continues to
reward close study. Volume IV of his papers has recently been
published, Volume V is planned, a Werkausgabe has begun to appear in
German, and there are Schutz archives at Yale University, Konstanz
University in Germany, and Waseda University in Japan. Several
international conferences were held in the centennial year of 1999,
and there is even a video of his life and work.
2. Phenomenological Philosophy of the Social Sciences

If phenomenology is comprehended in the strict signification now
sometimes qualified as Husserlian, there can be no doubt that Alfred
Schutz is the preeminent phenomenological philosopher of the social
sciences. But such a characterization needs to be comprehended
carefully. "Philosophy" in this connection as well as "social science"
have somewhat distinctive significations for him.

In his 1932 book Schutz lists not only economics, jurisprudence,
sociology, and political science, but also biography and the histories
of art, economics, music, philosophy, and politics (and implicitly
archaeology) as "Sozialwissenschaften." This may reflect Austrian
views early in the last century, but in his American period he
similarly lists cultural anthropology, economics, history, law,
linguistics, sociology, and the sciences of mythology and religion.
This list can seem odd today because the historical sciences and
jurisprudence are not usually considered social sciences, at least in
the United States. A broader title seems necessary. In the Austrian
writings, "Geisteswissenschaften" is used as an alternative for what
can be called "the social sciences in the broad signification," and
this has been rendered as "human sciences" in recent translations.
Another expression, "Kulturwissenschaften," is, however, rather
prominent in the original German of "Phenomenology and the Social
Sciences" of 1940, the manifesto written at the time of his transition
to his new country; it even occurs in the original title. "Cultural
science" might be preferred as an alternative to "social science" in
the broad signification. Moreover, "Wissenschaft," usually translated
as "science," is not confined in German thought to explanatory
disciplines based on experimentation and sensuous perception. One gets
the most from studying Schutz if one bears in mind that his philosophy
of the cultural sciences is concerned with all of the above listed
disciplines. In Austria Schutz used forms of "Wissenschaftstheorie,"
including "Theorie der Sozialwissenschaften," to characterize his
work; in the United States he initially used "methodology and
epistemology" to render "Wissenschaftslehre," but later preferred
"theory of the social sciences." The expression "philosophy of the
social sciences" does not occur in his oeuvre, perhaps because it had
not yet been coined in his time. In Schutz's theory of science or
"science theory," as it might also be called (although this is not his
expression), the concern is emphatically with the basic concepts and
postulates of scientific thinking per se. What is particularly
interesting about Schutz's position, is, however, his recognition that
the cultural or social scientists regularly reflect on those same
themes, i.e., that they too engage in science theory. This makes
discussions of basic concepts and methodology between scientists and
philosophers possible. Schutz was especially impressed by Max Weber's
science theory, he found some science-theoretical reflections in Hans
Kelsen's pure theory of law, and he unsuccessfully sought a discussion
of science-theoretical issues with the sociologist Talcott Parsons. He
did succeed in having such discussions with some "Austrian school"
economists, including Fritz Machlup, Friedrich A. Hayek, and Ludwig
von Mises. He recognized, however, that science-theoretical
reflections by scientists tend to be limited by the needs of the
particular disciplines and hence seldom reach a fully philosophical
level. Schutz's project as a philosopher was then to reflect on the
practices of the cultural sciences, asking intelligent questions and
learning from the scientists themselves, and then interpreting for
them what they do, thereby possibly eliminating some difficulties in
the foundations of the edifice of science that they seldom inspect.
Schutz's approach can be called a "gentle prescriptivism," which may
be why his thought has been very well received in a score of
non-philosophical disciplines concerned with aspects of the
sociocultural world. "Theory of science" can be an inclusionary title,
while "philosophy" in this age of hyperspecialization is often
exclusionary, with the consequence that efforts by cultural scientists
to reflect on their own disciplines are not taken seriously by
philosophers. Schutz's Aufbau is a masterpiece in Wissenschaftslehre
regarding interpretative sociology and begins with an examination of
the sociologist Max Weber's science-theoretical reflections on that
science. Probably because he taught only sociology in the early years,
had prominent students in that discipline (e.g., Thomas Luckmann), and
had a will to communicate with scientists, Schutz is sometimes
characterized as a "phenomenological sociologist." But he also taught
philosophy, including students such as Maurice Natanson, and nearly
all of his publications are clearly philosophical scholarship or
investigations. When his New School colleague Leo Strauss once praised
him as "a philosophically sophisticated sociologist," Schutz responded
that he preferred to be considered "a sociologically sophisticated
philosopher." Finally, it is crucial to recognize that Schutz's
philosophy of the social sciences is phenomenological. This signifies
that he reflectively analyzes how sociocultural objects are
constructed with meaning in everyday life, largely with concepts found
in ordinary language and thereby open to interpretation. More will be
said about this presently, but it deserves mention at this point that
he characterized his approach in terms of what Husserl called
"constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude." Schutz appears
to have considered this sufficient for his science-theoretical
purposes, even though he also understood transcendental phenomenology
clearly. His objections to positivism aside, there are three main
themes to Schutz's philosophy of the social sciences: defining their
region, clarifying their categories, and articulating their
postulates. In the first place, there is the problem of the
delimitations of the realm of the social sciences in both the broad
and the narrow significations. Schutz held that all science is
theoretical and requires entry into the preconstituted subuniverse of
a discipline. "On Multiple Realities" (1945)—perhaps his most famous
essay—is devoted to contrasting the theoretical and practical
attitudes, phantasy and dream being considered along the way. In other
texts he offers a taxonomy of the positive sciences. Except to agree
with Husserl on the unification of all sciences by formal logic,
Schutz has little to say about the formal sciences. This and his
opposition to positivism may have led some to believe that he opposed
mathematization in the cultural sciences, but he clearly accepted it
in economics, arguably the most mathematized social science, and could
easily have accepted it elsewhere as well. On the assumption of an
implicit distinction between sciences of content and sciences of form,
the "contentual sciences," as they might be called, are, for Schutz,
of two kinds, the naturalistic and the cultural. Against much
philosophy of science, especially in the Anglo-American world, Schutz
agreed with Dilthey and Husserl before him, and later with others such
as Gurwitsch, on the priority of the cultural over the naturalistic
sciences. This is because when first theorized about, the world is
concretely cultural, i.e., it is always already interpreted on the
common-sense level of everyday life and ordinary language. While one
can then immediately engage in cultural science, a further type
abstraction is needed in order to distinguish nature from the rest of
the cultural world and engage in naturalistic science. The abstraction
from the common-sense interpretation by which the subject matter of
the naturalistic sciences is constituted can become deeply habitual
and traditional in philosophers as well as scientists. But because of
this abstraction, the nature obtained hardly "comes naturally" to us,
and the sciences in which aspects of it are thematized can be called
"naturalistic," although Schutz did not use this expression. (It may
also now be clearer why "cultural science" can be preferred for the
sciences that thematize aspects of the original and concrete cultural
world.) And Schutz believed, by the way, that there was more to be
learned about human knowledge from the cultural than from the
naturalistic sciences—behaviorists, for example, being unable to
account for how they themselves ca even practice science. As might
have been suspected when the broad signification of social or, better,
cultural science was introduced above, some specification of this kind
of science is called for. Unfortunately, Schutz does not discuss
psychology as a cultural science, but he does distinguish the social
sciences in what can be called the narrow signification from the
historical sciences. His position is that the world of others has
three basic regions, that of "contemporaries," who are alive at the
same time with a given member or group, the scientist included, that
of "predecessors," who are dead; and that of "successors," who are yet
to be born. Predecessors can influence contemporaries by writing
wills, for example, and successors can similarly be influenced by
contemporaries (and predecessors). Successors cannot be understood,
however, since there is nothing yet to understand, and predecessors
can be understood through texts, traces, and oral tradition. Only for
contemporaries is mutual influencing and understanding possible.
"Consociates" make up a subset of contemporaries who can reciprocally
as well as unilaterally understand and influence one another within a
shared place as well as in the shared time of all contemporaries. The
social sciences in the narrow signification are then about
contemporaries and the historical sciences are about predecessors. But
the rise of "contemporary history" has made this division
problematical. Since Schutz accepted the universes of the sciences as
they are defined by the scientific communities concerned, it is likely
that he would have accepted that contemporary history is history,
although it is not clear how he might have corrected his original
position on the difference of the historical from the social sciences
in the narrow signification. Perhaps the historical sciences are
different because they extend their explanations beyond the realm of
contemporaries into that of predecessors, while social sciences
confine their explanations to the realm of contemporaries, but Schutz
does not state or imply this. The second theme of Schutz's theory of
the cultural sciences is the clarification of the categories or "basic
concepts" of the sciences. To show what this is about, it is most
efficient merely to quote the list on the first page of Schutz's
Aufbau of the basic concepts of interpretative sociolology that he
then attempts to clarify in his book: "the interpretation of one's own
and others' experiences, meaning-establishment and
meaning-interpretation, symbol and symptom, motive and project,
meaning-adequacy and causal adequacy, and, above all, the nature of
ideal-typical concept formation." Investigation beyond Schutz's work
should pursue similar concepts in other disciplines, beginning from
the science-theoretical reflections of the scientists themselves while
always being prepared to go further. The third theme of Schutz's
philosophy or theory of the social or cultural sciences is methodology
in a narrow signification. It is about rules of procedure, which are
articulated with "postulates." These are to be obtained by reflective
observation and analysis of actual scientific practice, then reported
back to the scientists whose practice they explicate. A complete
interpretation of Schutz's thought in this respect has yet to be
published. Besides those postulates included in the several lists, the
moves, for example, of abstracting nature from the rest of the
sociocultural world in the naturalistic sciences and of using
individual action as a starting point in the cultural sciences are
explicitly said to be postulates, while the requirement of adopting a
theoretical attitude is only implicitly a postulate for all science.
Schutz recognized that there were many more postulates yet to be
explicated from scientific practice. But five can be mentioned here,
three for the empirical sciences in general and two for specifically
social or cultural science. In all empirical sciences, naturalistic as
well as cultural, (1) all terms are to be as clear and distinct as
possible; (2) propositions are to be consistent and compatible within
and between particular disciplines; and (3) all scientific thought is
to be derived directly or indirectly from tested observation. (In the
naturalistic sciences this observation is sensuous, but in the
cultural sciences it is chiefly interpretation of statements by
informants.) In the cultural sciences specifically, (4) there is the
postulate of subjective meaning or interpretation, which Schutz has
from Max Weber. By this postulate, models of aspects of the
sociocultural world, which are scientific constructs about
common-sense constructs, must ultimately refer to the subjective
meaning of the actor on the social scene. The actor alone knows her
purpose, where her action begins and ends, what its stages are, and
afterward how well she has succeeded. When a surgeon decides not to
operate, that too is an action. The partner in an interaction is next
most cognizant of but still not privy to what can also be called the
"insider interpretation" of the action by the actor. Then come the
other "outsider interpretation," so to speak, those of the observer in
everyday life, followed by that of the cultural scientist, and finally
that of the science theorist, who is thus at four removes from the
originally meaningful action. (5) By the postulate of adequacy, the
account produced by the cultural scientist must be understandable by
the actor or group reflected on. This recourse to the informant(s)
after the fact of scientific interpretation is similar to Schutz's
philosophical recourse to the science-theoretical analyses produced by
the cultural scientists themselves, just as the attitude of the
scientist is similar to that of the observer in everyday life. There
are subsidiary components to Schutz's theory of the cultural sciences,
such as the recognition of schools of thought within disciplines, but
the foregoing should suffice to prepare the reader to study his
oeuvre. But something can also be said about areas in which his
thinking has been and/or needs to be extended. In the first place,
while there is considerable focus on the particular sciences of
economics and sociology, the scope of Schutz's science theory is
clearly much broader. If this is recognized, then it is also clear
that philosophers inspired by his work could engage in discussions
with scientists of other disciplines (e.g., archaeologists), seeking
to define the discipline, to clarify its basic concepts, and to
explicate postulates for them. In the second place, while Schutz is
emphatic that the constructs produced in the cultural sciences are
constructs of a second level that are about the constructs of the
first level, which is that of common sense and ordinary language, he
did not ask what the constructs of the primary level are themselves
about. This is undoubtedly because in everyday life a
conceptualization of objects automatically occurs that is perhaps most
obvious in how names come to mind (or awkwardly fail to do so) when
one encounters objects. In addition, the words "meaning" and
"significance" can shed more shadow than light. If one abstracts from
such conceptualization, however, one can observe that cultural objects
already have values and uses that are not conceptual meanings bestowed
on sheerly physical things, but original determinations of the objects
that such conceptual meanings are bestowed upon and that ordinary
language refers to. Consequently, two abstractions are actually needed
to reach the nature thematized in the naturalistic sciences. This is
not to reject Schutz's interpretationism, but it is to assert that
cultural objects, situations, and worlds are cultural by virtue of
values and uses that are not reducible to conceptual meaning-bestowal
and categorial formation. In the third place, Schutz's great emphasis
is on theoretical science, but there are also the so-called "applied
sciences," such as nursing and psychiatry, which are deserving of
great attention from philosophers, and one can explore how Schutz's
science theory can be extended to include such disciplines. These
practical disciplines are perhaps better characterized as
"science-based" rather than "applied" because rarely is only one
science applied in them; instead, the practitioners select what suits
their purposes from various theoretical disciplines and unhesitatingly
engage in theoretical research themselves where it is needed. Finally,
a comparative study of Schutz's theory of the cultural sciences, which
does emphasize the social sciences in the narrow signification, with
the theory of the interpretation and critique of texts and
traces—i.e., hermeneutics, which can be said to emphasize the
historical sciences—should shed light on both and perhaps lead toward
a more balanced and complete theory of the cultural sciences in
general. Overall, Alfred Schutz's work is a model for the
philosophical analysis of science that begins from reflective
observation on scientific practices as relating to the objects of
their provinces and, correlatively, on such objects as theorized about
and observed in those practices.
3. References and Further Reading

* Alfred Schutz Aron Gurwitsch Briefwechsel 1939-1959. Ed. Richard
Grathoff. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1985. English translation:
Philosophers in Exile: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Aron
Gurwitsch, 1939-1959. Trans. J. Claude Evans. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1989.
* "Choice and the Social Sciences." Ed. Lester E. Embree. In
Life-World and Consciousness: Essays for Aron Gurwitsch. Ed. Lester E.
Embree, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972, 565-90.
* "Husserl and His Influence on Me." Ed. Lester Embree. The Annals
of Phenomenological Sociology 2 (1977), 40-44.
* Collected Papers, Vol. I, The Problem of Social Reality. Ed.
Maurice Natanson. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962.
* Collected Papers, Vol. II, Studies in Social Theory, Ed. Arvid
Brodersen, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964.
* Collected Papers, Vol. III, Studies in Phenomenological
Philosophy. Ed. Ilse Schutz. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966.
* Collected Papers, Vol. IV. Ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas,
and Fred Kersten, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996.
* "Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of
Interpretative Social Science: An Ineditum of Alfred Schutz from
Spring 1953." Ed. Lester Embree. Husserl Studies 14 (1997), 123-49.
* Reflections on the Problem of Relevance. Ed. Richard M. Zaner.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.
* Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt [1932]. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1974. English translation: Phenomenology
of the Social World. Trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967.
* The Theory of Social Action. Ed. Richard Grathoff. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1978.
* Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, Die Strukturen der
Lebenswelt, 2 vols. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1975; Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1953. English translation: The Structures of the Lifeworld,
Vol. I. Trans. Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr.; Vol.
II. Trans. Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent. Evanston, Ill:
Northwestern University Press, 1973, 1989.