Phenomenology And Social Reality Essays In Memory Of Alfred Schutz

Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna on April 13, 1899, and died in New York City on May 20, 1959. The year 1969, then, marks the seventieth anniversary of his birth and the tenth year of his death. The essays which follow are offered not only as a tribute to an irreplaceable friend, colleague, and teacher, but as evidence of the contributors' conviction of the eminence of his work. No special pleading is needed here to support that claim, for it is widely acknowledged that his ideas have had a significant impact on present-day philosophy and phenomenology of the social sciences. In place of either argument or evaluation, I choose to restrict myself to some bi~ graphical information and a fragmentary memoir. * The only child of Johanna and Otto Schutz (an executive in a private bank in Vienna), Alfred attended the Esterhazy Gymnasium in Vienna, an academic high school whose curriculum included eight years of Latin and Greek. He graduated at seventeen - in time to spend one year of service in the Austrian army in the First World War. For bravery at the front on the battlefield in Italy, he was decorated by his country. After the war ended, he entered the University of Vienna, completing a four year curriculum in only two and one half years and receiving his doctorate in Law.

In recent decades, the historical social sciences have moved away from deterministic perspectives and increasingly embraced the interpretive analysis of historical process and social and political change. This shift has enriched the field but also led to a deadlock regarding the meaning and status of subjective knowledge. Cultural interpretivists struggle to incorporate subjective experience and the body into their understanding of social reality. In the early twentieth century, philosopher Alfred Schutz grappled with this very issue. Drawing on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Max Weber’s historical sociology, Schutz pioneered the interpretive analysis of social life from an embodied perspective. However, the recent interpretivist turn, influenced by linguistic philosophies, discourse theory, and poststructuralism, has overlooked the insights of Schutz and other phenomenologists. This book revisits Schutz’s phenomenology and social theory, positioning them against contemporary problems in social theory and interpretive social science research. The book extends Schutz’s key concepts of relevance, symbol relations, theory of language, and lifeworld meaning structures. It outlines Schutz’s critical approach to the social distribution of knowledge and develops his nascent sociology and political economy of knowledge. This book will appeal to readers with interests in social theory, phenomenology, and the methods of interpretive social science, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, science and technology studies, political economy, and international relations.

This book is intended as a celebration of the legacy of Alfred Schutz in honor of the 100th anniversary of the year of his birth in 1999. It represents the contributions of a number of Schutzian scholars from the United States, Europe and Asia who have reflected on the significance of Schutz's work for philosophy and the human sciences for many years. Their work was first presented at international conferences held at Waseda University, Japan, March, 1999, the University of Konstanz, Germany, May 1999, and at the meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences at the University of Oregon, USA, October, 1999. The editors were organizers of these conferences. These contributions trace connections and continuities with other major theorists and scholars ranging from Max Weber to Talcott Parsons and Pierre Bourdieu; to assessments of his contributions to methodology and social theory; to ethics and the political sphere; to his appeal in fields beyond philosophy, as well as to his wide-ranging explorations of the life-world. Schutz's legacy continues to be found in various places in the human sciences and philosophy and in the intersections of these disciplines. These papers contribute to the on-going dialogue and assessment of Schutz's corpus of work and to fresh appraisals of the continuing relevance of his work.

Alfred Schutz devoted his life to a clarification of the foun dations of the social sciences. His first formulation of the perti nent problems is contained in DER SINNHAFTE AUFBAu DER SOZIALEN WELT, EINE EINLEITUNG IN DIE VERSTEHENDE SOZIOLOGIE, now available in a second unrevised German edition with an English translation in preparation. Since I932, the date of this work, Alfred Schutz pursued painstaking and detailed investigations of issues which arose in connection with his early endeavors. These investigations were originally published as a series of essays and monographs over a period of about twenty years and are now assembled in the COLLECTED PAPERS of which this is the third and final volume. They form a unitary whole insofar as a common core of problems and theoretical ideas is presented from varying perspectives. Together DER SINNHAFTE AUFBAu DER SOZIALEN WELT and the three volumes of COL LECTED PAPERS set forth a comprehensive and consistent theory of the world of everyday life as the reality with which the social sciences are essentially concerned. Alfred Schutz was preparing a systematic presentation of his theory and of the results of his investigations into the struc tures of the world of everyday life when death overtook him. The manuscript containing the final statement of his philosophical and sociological thinking was not completely ready for publi cation at the time of his death. It is now being brought into book form by Professor Thomas Luckmann, one of his former students.

The maintext in the present volume has beenconstructed out of passages found scattered aboutin thirty-five years of Alfred Schutz's writings, and it has been constructed by following a pageof notes for a lecture that he gave in 1955 under the title "Sociological Aspect of Literature. " The result can be considered the substance of Schutz's contribution to the theory of literature. More detail about how this construction has beenperformed is offered in the Editor's Introduction. The complementary essays areby scholars from Germany, Japan, andthe United States , from several generations, and from the disciplines of anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. These researchers were invited to reflect in their own perspectives on the main text and in relation to matters referred to within and beyond it. Draftversions of most of these complementary essays were presented for critical discussion in a research symposium held at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science of theNewSchool for Social Research on April28-29, 1995 underthe sponsorship of The Center for Advanced Research in Phenomen ology, Inc. , Florida Atlantic University; The Department of Philosophy of The Graduate Faculty of the New School, Richard 1. Bernstein, Chair; and Evelyn and George Schutz, the philosopher's children. Revised versions of these presentations and also several essays subsequently recruited are offered to begin yet another stagein thehistory of scholarship on Schutz and the phenomenological research inspired by him. Northwestern University Press is thanked for permission to quote extensively from Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans.

Although Alfred Schutz' thought focused on the phenomenological founding of interpretive sociology, he also believed it relevant for other social and even historical sciences. His thought has been internationally appreciated in a wide range of human scientific disciplines. This collection of essays assesses Schutz' impact and potential beyond sociology and philosophy. It includes essays from a geographer and an economist and addresses topics such as communicology, computerization, politics, and literature, as well as psychology and sociology. The sixteen contributors to this volume were asked to prepare essays that reviewed the impact of Schutz in their discipline, discussed the potential, and attempted novelly to actualize some of that potential.