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Alfred Schutz was a social scientist as well as a philosopher whose ideas are increasingly
appreciated all around the planet and in nineteen different disciplines through fourteen
different languages. My purpose today is to try to help you begin to understand his
thoughts and then maybe you will try to read his writings. His writings are among the
easiest to understand by any philosopher in the twentieth century. But I would not only be
talking about his ideas. Alfred Schutz also shows how one can live a full life as a human
being. He cared intensely for his family, his friends, his students, and he was loved by
them in return.
Schutz’s life falls into two parts. He was born and grew up in Vienna, Austria and
worked there until 1938 when the Nazis invaded. Then, he and his family fled through
Paris to the United States where he was able to study, work, teach for the rest of his life.
Before we get into the intertwined stories of Schutz’s life and his thinking, let me explain
that Schutz’s thought was, well, the best word is transdisciplinary. When he started
teaching, he taught sociology as well as philosophy, but he could have just as easily
taught economics or linguistics or political science. He was concerned, you see, with the
general approach and the basic ideas shared by all the social sciences, not just this or that
particular discipline.
Concerning Schutz’s childhood, we are fortunate that Alfred’s wife, Ilse, was
My husband was born in Vienna, Austria on April 13, 1899. His mother’s
name was Johanna Schutz, born Fillia, born on November 19, 1873 in
half months before his son was born and how, after a few years, his mother married her
husband’s brother, Otto – a common practice in that time. His mother was always very
ambitious for him, and he was always the best at school. He studied eight years of Latin
and eight years of Greek. He did not participate much at sports because his mother
always tried to make him do things that he was good at. As a youth he began his lifelong
interest in literature and painting. He really admired Bellini’s Pieta and Rembrandt’s
Jewish Bride, but his most beloved art was music. Alfred Schutz’s son, George, will tell
us about how his father said he became interested in music when he was young.
very young. Of course, standing room in the opera was tradition. That was
where you met people, and street cleaners outside would sing arias from
operas they heard the night before. And, of course, my father was very
libraries and did a lot of research. He ultimately found out more about
music than many professionals who came to him for coaching because his
Austrian Army. This was in the time of the Gr eat War, World War I. He could have
avoided service because of a chronic ear infection, but chose not to mention it to the
doctors, and he more or less expected to die. He joined the artillery and after training was
assigned the task of establishing and restoring communications between the front lines
and headquarters. He spent ten months at the front, and then got a furlough, taking what
proved to be the last train from the front to Vienna.. When he arrived, he found the war
had ended and the revolution that ended the monarchy had begun.
Schutz began his formal studies at the University of Vienna immediately. His
only benefit as a veteran was that he could graduate in two and a half years rather than
four, but still doing the same amount of work. He studied law with a concentration in
international law, his main professor being Hans Kelsen. He also tended the Viennese
Academy of International Trade. And, later he told Talcott Parsons that “I came from the
Fritz Machlup, the famous economist. He was interviewed by George Schutz in 1980 .
I think I met your father in 1924 in the private seminar of Professor Mises,
Ludwig von Mises, of which your father and I were members. That was
really attended only by very young people. And all members had interest
lawyer would ever talk about law. Your father had a law degree.
Economics was taught in the faculty of law. So, your father was exposed
to courses in economics from the very beginning, but at the same time his
very interested in how we economists try to think, and how we argue, how
ideas. And, there were many, many times that after a meeting we would
spend hours talking. I remember there were days when we stopped talking
at three or four o’clock in the morning, often walking in the street, just
talking and talking without end. And very often I had great resistance,
inner resistance, to the way your father was seeing things. But then very
I think its fair to say that by participating in such intellectual circles as the privät seminar
of Ludwig von Mises, as well as the intense dialogues with people like his friend
Vienna.
Edmund Husserl, the philosopher who had the greatest influence on Alfred
Schutz, used to say that he was a business executive by day and a phenomenological
philosopher by night. Schutz himself said that he was a better business man because he
Two months before he received his law degree, his teacher, von Mises, got him a
job working with a group of twenty-seven Viennese banks. He supervised ten people, and
he worked on projects involving the reform of the currency for Austria and a loan for the
League of Nations. In 1927 Schutz became a executive officer for the private bank of
Reitler and Co. where he had 60 people to supervise, and Robert Lambert was his boss.
Just before the war he was involved in reorganizing the international interest of R.
Dreyfus and Co. whose interest included Heineken Beer. Schutz had similar positions
with the same companies in Vienna, Paris, and then New York for the rest of his life.
After a six year courtship, Alfred Schutz and Ilse Heime were married in 1926.
It almost sounded like a fairy tale when my mother told me the story of how they
met, how my father and her met. She always dreamed as a little girl that she
would meet her husband on top of a mountain and that is exactly how they did
meet. She was with a group of girls climbing up one side of the mountain, he was
with a group of boys going up the other side, and they met on top. My mother
made very clear that in those days one socialized in groups and not as a couple.
So, many of these friendships that later became so important were made when my
During the early years of this marriage and before they had children, Ilse accompanied
Alfred Schutz was also working towards a book during the 1920s. This recording
dictated years later addresses the most crucial development in that effort.
foundations of the social sciences, especially sociology. At that time, I was under
recognized, however, very soon that Max Weber had forged the tools he needed
for his concrete research, but that his main problem – understanding the
subjective meaning a social action has for the actor – needed further philosophical
neither of the works of Cohen, Natorp, nor of the earlier writings of Ernst Cassirer
Bergson’s philosophy impressed me, however, deeply. I was convinced that his
used as a starting point for an interpretations of the unclarified basic notions of the
intersubjectivity. At that time I was closely connected with the late Felix
Kaufmann who worked on his first book, Logik und Rechtswissenschaft, in which
Untersuchungen, the first volume of the Ideas, the only one then published. This I
did with the greatest care, but in spite of my admiration, I could not find in these
books the bridge to the problems with which I was concerned. Then, in 1928 the
understandable, and when in 1929 the Formal and Transcendental Logic appeared
importance of Husserl’s thought for all the questions which preoccupied me.
From the outset I was more interest in what Husserl called later on in the
Nachwort of the Ideas, “phenomenology of the natural attitude” than the problems
phenomenology for any attempt of exploring the social reality consisted in the
fact, also established by Husserl, that all knowledge achieved by analysis of the
Schutz sent a copy of his book to Edmund Husserl. Husserl praised it highly and
welcomed three or four visits a year from Schutz, until the great philosopher died in
1938. Alfred Schutz disagreed with some aspects of Husserl’s philosophy, but he
Schutz’s masterpiece has five parts. Let me just talk about two of them. One of
them is devoted to subjective meaning, which is a notion Schutz has from the writings of
Max Weber. And it is interesting that Professor Mises assigned Schutz to study those
writings for the private seminar. Subjective meanings are the meanings that objects,
actions, relationships have for actors in the social world; they relate to those actors. I
sometimes like to call them “insider interpretations,” and they then contrast with what
you’d call outsider interpretations which other people have of those objects and actions
and so forth. An example might be useful at this point. Suppose you’re walking in the
country, and you see a man chopping wood. You see what he’s doing, but you don’t
really understand it. It may be he’s a city person out just practicing with an ax. Maybe
he’s chopping wood to store it up for the winter. Maybe he was just in an argument and is
working off his anger. You don’t understand the subjective meaning just because you are
watching him swing the ax against pieces of wood. To understand the action one has to
get at the subjective meaning or insider interpretation that the actor himself has for that
action. This is different often from the interpretations that others have, the outsider
interpretations you may say. How do you get that? Well, the best way is simply to
interview the person, to ask them. But for routine acts you can just be around them and
see the action as it builds up and the action is part of it. So the bottom line in social
science for Alfred Schutz is that the scientist has to grasp the subjective meanings that
actions and objects and so forth have for the social actors. Indeed, when a theory is
developed in social science its terms have to make sense to the actors.
Now before I tell you something more about Schutz’s masterpiece, I have to
mention that he was only able to produce it because his wife, Ilse, had become what she
later called his “scientific secretary.” Ilse took dictation and typed no less than six drafts
before the book was finished, and helped him in this way many times during the rest of
his life. I must also mention Schutz’s Japanese friend, Tomoo Otaka. He was a
philosopher of law who later helped to write Japan’s post-war constitution and is seen
here on a visit with his family to Husserl. He was in Vienna to buy books and provided
the subvention for publishing Schutz’s book, saying the money came from his
government budget, when it was actually his own personal money that he used.
structure of the social world, but this creative translation is not really that misleading. But
what is the most general structure of the social world? In the first place we have to realize
that the social world is made up of others, other people. The Latin word here is socii, and
therefore we have the word social. Second, we might be tempted to divide up the social
world into the living, the dead and the unborn. But Schutz prefers to use words that relate
to a self. Therefore, we have contemporaries who are living, and then we have
predecessors who are dead, and of course we have successors that are not yet born. Next
we can recognize that there are two ways in which we can relate to others. One is, as we
influence on them. It is interesting that we can influence our successors, for example, by
writing a will, but we can’t understand them; they’re not born yet. In contrast with that,
but we cannot act on them. Their lives are over with; they’re dead.
The interesting thing about people alive at the same time is that there can be
reciprocity. Thus, when we share a place, your are in the same space as well as time, you
can understand other people directly, but they can understand you directly back. Similarly
you can influence them directly, and they can directly influence you back. Others you can
indirectly influence and understand, perhaps over the telephone or by writing a letter, but
there can then be this reciprocity for the people who are alive at the same time that you
don’t have with predecessors and successors. And so for Schutz the structure of the social
world has four regions: predecessors and successors, “consociates” he calls the one’s that
share a place, and contemporaries are the ones who are alive at the same time, but not
sharing same place. This is a funny thing to ask about, perhaps even scientists don’t ask
much about it, but for a philosopher it’s a very good question, and what Schutz has
described holds for any social world whatsoever, not just this one or that one, but for all
social worlds.
In 1932 after his book was out and was attracting more and more attention, Schutz
was traveling back and forth between Vienna and Paris and paid visits to Edmund
Husserl along the way. His daughter Evelyn was born in 1934 and was very much
enjoyed. Intellectually, he was working on his second book. Then, the world in Vienna
I was born at the end of February in Vienna, Austria about a week or two before
the Anschloss when Germany was annexing Austria by force. She was actually
still in the hospital as the troops marched under the window. My mother said that
we should really leave. My father thought that there was no reason to leave
because we hadn’t done anything wrong. And my mother thought that being
Jewish was enough reason. So, I was smuggled out of the country in my sister’s
doll carriage as the family went to Paris in 1938. The quota for Austrians to come
to American actually broke off in the middle of our family so that my mother was
forced to go to the United States to establish residency, and it wasn’t until a year
While Ilse went to New York to establish residency for the family, Alfred
remained at his job in Paris. From the extensive files of letters, it seems that he was
nevertheless very busy writing each night to encourage and otherwise help family and
personal and professional friends through that difficult time. First of all there was his and
Ilse’s parents. Others helped before, during, and after the war include his teacher and,
later on, friend, Ludwig von Mises. And then there were Hans Kelsen, Siegfried
Kracauer, Ludwig Landgrebe, Jean Herring, and Jacques Maritain. This telegram conveys
that Schutz had succeeded in arranging a job at Johns Hopkins University for Aron
Gurwitsch whom he had met at Husserl’s urging in Paris in 1935. Having that job made it
possible for Gurwitsch and his wife to immigrate from Paris. In the United States, Schutz
also kept closely in touch with his friends from Vienna The included not only Fritz
Machlup, but also Emmanuel Winternitz, Felix Kaufmann, Eric Voegelin, and his
In the United States Schutz’s business career continued with the same private
banking firms and he also continued to study and write at night after his family went to
bed. But in addition he had the opportunity to have a teaching career on the Graduate
Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research. He taught
in the evening so that he could come home, eat with the family, and go back, initially
teaching one course a week and eventually becoming a full professor and chair of both
sociology and philosophy. Schutz became interested in the New School when the
sociologist, Albert Salomon, brought him into the General Seminar, which was
something like what he had experienced with Ludwig von Mises in Vienna two decades
before. He also had his old friend Felix Kaufmann from Vienna who died in 1949 and
whom he replaced in teaching philosophy. Later, Dorion Cairns, whom he had met at
consultant to the Roosevelt administration on how the central European economies might
be rebuilt after the war, and he became clearly interested in this new political system. His
research was mostly focused on concrete and practical issues. “The Stranger” describes
what happens when people coming to live in a new country find that their vague,
background knowledge ceases to work, and they must learn a new cultural pattern. I
mentioned earlier that he used his experience as a returning veteran from World War I to
analyze what would happen when the veterans came back from World War II. He even
Concerning the family life, Ilse and Alfred began exposing their young son to
music.
I started with my mother at the piano learning how to read music. And my father
recognized that when I was very young and taught me how to read scores. And
the irony is that when I was six years old I had an accident that made it impossible
which was basically him explaining to me the structure of a piece and then line by
line memorizing it and seeing how it fit together. And an interesting thing that
resulted from that was that if I ever got lost when I was playing a piece, I could
find my way back by remembering the structure that he had taught me. Whereas if
you just learn by ear you would probably have to go back to the beginning and do
the whole thing over again before you could memorize it.
Now let me tell you about Alfred Schutz’s most famous essay, “On Multiple
Realities,” published in 1945. The title comes from the early work of William James.
This is a chart of how four mental attitudes are compared and contrasted by Schutz in six
ways. Let me make only three points with it. In the first place when you are in one
attitude you believe in one set of objects and suspend belief in objects of the other three
attitudes. Epoch‘ is a philosophical word for the suspension of belief. And when you
believe in something, it is a reality for you. And therefore the title of this essay. Thus
when you believe in the world of everyday practical working, your beliefs in objects of
imagination, dreaming, and theorizing are suspended. And when you believe in imagined
objects, for example when you watch a stage play, the world of working is temporarily
In the second place, what you directly or indirectly believe in, in the attitudes of
practical working and theorizing, is very well organized, while the worlds of imagination
and especially dreaming are not. In the third place, there is what Schutz calls sociality. In
this respect two or more people can act together in working, obviously. And they can also
dream, however, about others, but you cannot dream with others, like you can work and
imagine with others. And theorizing is like dreaming. When you are actually doing it,
you are necessarily alone or solitary. Schutz’s main purpose in this analysis is a
contrasting of the working that goes on in everyday practical life with the theoretical
thinking in science in which the world in constructed. This is a fascinating analysis with
much more detail than I can give you, especially for the philosopher of science.
There were two follow-ups to Schutz’s essay. In the first place he used Cervantes’
novel Don Quixote to illustrate the analysis in it. His Mexican friend, Luis Recasens
Siches, who stands just behind Ortega y Gasset here, translated it, and it was published by
the great phenomenologist, Edwardo Nicol. The other follow-up to “On Multiple
Realities” is this important essay in which Schutz goes on to explore how we use symbols
in art, religion and science in order to believe in objects beyond the reality of every day
life. Schutz’s essays were written over a period of years. Not only did he work on them at
night, but he also worked on them when on vacation with his family.
[FILM]
Schutz’s methodology focuses on how scientific models of the social world are built up
in thinking. This theorizing, as it can also be called, is done of course in the theoretical
attitude, which we’ve already heard about. Furthermore what it is ultimately concerned
with are those subjective meanings that we have already heard about. Schutz’s best
statement about the methodology of the social sciences was published in 1953 and
reprinted as the first chapter of the first volume of his Collected Papers.
Let me ask you to imagine a familiar example. Suppose there is a store with
several dozen customers milling about and maybe a dozen sales people. The roles aren’t
exactly the same, that the customers and the clerks play. The clerks have to be on the
lookout for shoplifters. The customers don’t do that . They might focus on how one
customer is dressed, how they move about, how they stand, how old they are. In short,
what they do is build up a kind of profile, what Schutz and Max Weber would call an
“ideal type” of the suspicious customer, the customer who might be a shoplifter. There
can be another standpoint on this situation. The social scientist can be interested in how
the sales clerks form their ideal types about suspicious customers. How is that done? You
can interview these sales clerks; you can watch how they behave. Its called participant
observation. Afterwards the social scientists can then think about this and form his own
ideal types about how sales clerks interpret some customers as potential shoplifters. Then
there can be yet another standpoint, which is the standpoint of the methodologist.
Because the methodologist is interested in how the social scientists interpret how the
sales clerk interprets some of the customers. So there are three levels of interpretation
here. And that is basically what a methodologist does according to Alfred Schutz..
In 1955 and 1956, Alfred Schutz’s thinking turned once again to practical issues.
He was invited to a two week institute and also two conferences sponsered by the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America. The concern was not with equality of outcomes, but
rather with equality of opportunity. Schutz’s main contribution is, I believe, his very best
essay. I say this not so much for the focus on real problems, which was already present in
his essays on the stranger, the homecomer, and the well-informed citizen, but because he
focused on relations between social groups. In his previous work the focus was on
individual selves relating to others, not on groups. The participants initially considered
groups based on colonial status, religion, race, even sex. And in the discussions Schutz
found opportunity to comment about groups based on age. So that he was opposed to
and European-Americans or, in the words of that time, Negroes and Whites. After all
President Eisenhower would send troups to Little Rock, Arkansas the year after in order
to enforce the Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education that began the
racial integration of public schools in America. Thurgood Marshall, who won that case
before the Supreme Court and went on to become a member of that Court, is seated three
seats to the right of Schutz in this picture from a 1955 conference. The participants all
struggled to find a middle ground between abstract, philosophical and theological ideas,
on the one hand, and the common sense ideas that guide people’s behavior in everyday
life, on the other hand. Most of the others began from the abstract principles, but Schutz
There are two sorts of minority groups. One wants to keep its whole way of life,
its entire culture, within the society and still be treated as equal. The members of the
other want to adopt the way of life of the mainstream of the society and become
assimilated. Schutz recognized both types. The first type is today called multiculturalism.
In particular Schutz refers to the contrast between the common sense priorities of
There are thus differences in values and cultural outlooks, but there are also ideas of
equality that had trickled down from philosophy and religion. Finally, Schutz clearly calls
attention to the factor of social class, and thus economic and political power between
groups seeking equality and those in a position to grant it or not. Furthermore, he urges
education to bring about change and reduce social tensions. His thinking in the 1950s is
correspondance with his friend, Aron Gurwitsch. Along with Dorion Cairns and Aron
Gurwitsch and also Herbert Spiegleberg, he was a founding member of the international
phenomenological society under the leadership of Marvin Farber in 1940 and active in
editing his journal, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, thereafter. Soon after
the war he began returning to Europe regularly on business and thereby participated in
the development of phenomenology in Europe. He helped Father Van Breda develop the
Husserl Archives, a branch of which was established in Schutz’s memory at the New
Schutz was in his late fifties, his health began to decline. Just why he drew this self-
Let me convey two personal remembrances of Alfred Schutz, the first more
formal than the second. Schutz’s student Fred Kersten will read from the obituary that
person of an almost unique kind. He had a large variety of interests, the widest
general culture, a cosmopolitan outlook. Very rarely indeed does one encounter a
fields as Schutz had in philosophy, the social sciences, music, and literature.
encompassing knowledge. His mind was as penetrating, sharp, and keen as his
heart was warm and generous. There was something radiant in him. He
man. The universally respected scholar of international reputation was at the same
time, an urbane man of the world, a gentleman with all the nobility of character
Over twenty years later, Alfred Schutz’s personality remained especially vivid for
He loved his own jokes much better than the jokes of other people.
And laugh.
And the happiness with which he’d laugh, it was really touching that with
all his pessimism and depression that he’d came to tell jokes, he was a
different man.
I think people responded to his laughter almost more than to the jokes
themselves.
Exactly, correct.
Because of the extensive efforts of Alfred Schutz’s widow, Ilse, in the decades after his
death, his work is known today in practically every nation on earth. His daughter, Evelyn
Some translations:
Hverdagslivets sociologi
A Fenomenologia a Tarsadalom-Tudomanyban
Some Monographs and Volumes of Essays on Schutz:
Phenomenological Sociology
Worldly Phenomenology
Philosophers in Exile