System, Lifeworld and Communicative Action

System, Lifeworld and Communicative Action

At the end of the previous chapter I criticised Schutz's understanding of society qua social lifeworld for its failure to consider exchange relations in contemporary society, for its failure to deal with issues of interdependence, power and inequality, for its failure to consider the systemic aspects of the social world, and for its failure to engage with the specific concrete features of a social system (such as our own) in its proper historical context. Each of these features is, as I noted in my discussion, a feature of Merleau-Ponty's notion of ‘concrete intersubjectivity’. As I have argued elsewhere, however, Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the (concrete-intersubjective) social world is both theoretically flawed and empirically outdated (Crossley 1994). Moreover, ...