Schütz, Alfred

Austrian-born phenomenologist and social theorist Alfred Schütz made charting the structures of the lifeworld his life's work. In the course of this endeavor, he added a host of terms to the vocabulary of social science, including “typification,” “in-order-to and because-motives,” “course-of-action and personal ideal types,” “multiple realities,” “finite provinces of meaning,” and “the social distribution of knowledge.” Following his death in 1959, his devoted students published his collected papers, unfinished manuscripts, and an intellectual biography; arranged to have his first book translated into English (Schütz 1967); and integrated his concepts into a new theoretical perspective called social constructionism (Berger and Luckmann 1966). A number of scholars in Europe and America continue to undertake phenomenological research in the Schützian style. A group of economists explores Schütz's relationship to the Austrian school of economics while applying his analyses of temporality and the ideal type to the reform of the neoclassical paradigm. Many contemporary social theorists incorporate Schützian concepts into their own distinctive systems of thought.

Born into an affluent Viennese family in 1899, Schütz—he would drop the umlaut after immigrating to New York City in 1939—received a rigorous classical education at the Esterhazy Gymnasium, where he distinguished himself as a pianist and student of European musical history and literature. After service in the First World War, he abandoned his hopes for a career in music for one in international law and finance. Completing his degree on an accelerated schedule, he served as executive secretary for the Austrian Bankers Association in Vienna for seven years before joining a private bank as an attorney in 1929. Schütz remained in banking until 1956, by which time he had been teaching at the émigré-staffed New School for Social Research for 12 years.

Schütz's three major intellectual mentors were French philosopher Henri Bergson, sociologist Max Weber, and Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Weber had taught one semester at the University of Vienna in 1918, just before Schütz matriculated there, and greatly impressed the economics faculty, particularly Ludwig von Mises. After Schütz completed his degree in 1922, Mises invited him to join his private seminar, where the issues of objectivity, historicism, apriorism, Verstehen (understanding), holism, and methodological individualism were debated by a host of brilliant figures, many of whom became lifelong friends of Schütz's. During the 10 years that he participated in the seminar, Schütz tried to reconcile the inconsistencies in Weber's use of the term “subjective meaning” and to show how the methods of Verstehen and the ideal type can yield objective knowledge in the disciplines that take human action as their foundation. He first tried, unsuccessfully, to use Bergson's analyses of “duration” and memory as the bridge from subjective to objective meaning, then found in Husserl's analysis of internal time-consciousness the starting point he needed. After reading parts of it in the seminar, Schütz published Die Sinnhafte Aufbau der socialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie (The Meaningful Construction of the Social World: An Introduction to Interpretive Sociology) in 1932.

The discovery of duration, internal time-consciousness, or the stream of consciousness (as William James called it) was central to Schütz's account of subjective meaning. Subjective meaning arises through the retrospective unification of segments of a perennial, heterogeneous flux of sensations, perceptions, and reactions into experiences of this or that “type.” Only through disciplined reflection can one disentangle the layers of anticipation and interpretation involved in the typification of the simplest experience and reconstruct the stages through which a given phenomenon is constituted in its typicality. In Husserl's formulation, meaning arises through a “monothetic glance” over the “polythetic” flux that preceded it. The crucial fact is the temporal one: Meaning always arises retrospectively. Even one's prospective intentions are linguistically formulated in the future perfect tense—as actions one will have executed in the anticipated way.

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