Alfred Schütz, The Social World and the Theory of Social Action

Alfred Schütz’s theoretical essay, first published in 1960 and republished here in 1964, examines how social science can attain objective knowledge while preserving the subjective meanings constitutive of social action. It connects a critique of objectivism with an account of everyday interpretation, motives, and scientific ideal types. Objectivity requires disciplined reconstruction of actors’ perspectives, not their exclusion.

At first sight it is not easily understandable why the subjective point of view should be preferred in the social sciences.

Schütz takes this objection seriously: why should trained observers not describe social reality entirely through their own concepts? Radical behaviorism cannot dispense with understanding, since scientific communication and verification themselves presuppose intelligent others who grasp propositions. More moderate objective approaches can legitimately investigate institutions, groups, and relations without immediately reconstructing individual motives. Their validity depends on maintaining a delimited frame of reference.

Each social phenomenon may be studied under the scheme of reference of social relationship or social groups (or, may we be allowed to add, social institutions) but with equal legitimacy under the scheme of social acts or social persons.

Drawing on Znaniecki, Schütz allows multiple analytical perspectives. The methodological danger lies in moving unnoticed between them: concepts change their meaning when transferred between subjective and objective frames. What is legitimate as an abstraction becomes misleading when treated as a complete account of social reality. A theory of action must ultimately explain what the situation and the action mean for the actor.

These are the dangers that the mixing up of subjective and objective points of view would involve in the concrete work of social scientists.

The positive argument begins with ordinary experience. People encounter an already interpreted world, organized through education, accumulated experience, and cooperation. Objects acquire relevance in relation to possible action. Understanding social objects—tools, symbols, institutions, or artworks—requires reference to the human activities that produced them and their animating motives. Subjective meaning is thus part of the investigator’s subject matter, not a private supplement to observable facts.

The bracketed discussion of motives distinguishes action from behavior through its orientation toward a project. Actors imagine the intended accomplishment as already completed, in the future perfect tense. The projected outcome supplies an in-order-to motive, whereas because motives refer to the sedimented experiences and dispositions from which the project emerges. This distinction separates prospective purpose from retrospective explanation. It also permits changes in meaning: later reflection may reinterpret what an action accomplished.

Understanding another person does not require reproducing that person’s whole consciousness. Everyday interpretation works through typical situations, motives, means, and ends, with varying degrees of familiarity and anonymity. Typification consequently precedes scientific explanation; it is already a practical resource through which people anticipate and coordinate conduct.

Schütz develops this account through action oriented toward others. In an exchange of question and answer, an anticipated answer motivates the question, while understanding the question provides a motive for answering. Social relationships depend on such connections between motives, not simply on observable sequences of movements. Participants assume enough shared meaning to coordinate their actions, although their expectations remain open to correction. Scientific analysis must preserve this interpretive structure because it helps constitute the relationship itself.

The concluding methodological argument explains how a detached investigator can represent these subjective connections objectively. Following Weber, Schütz treats ideal types as constructed model actors, endowed with only the knowledge, motives, experiences, and plans relevant to a particular problem. Their circumstances and partners are likewise selected rather than exhaustively reproduced.

Four requirements discipline these constructions: relevance to the research problem, adequacy to everyday intelligibility, logical consistency, and compatibility with scientifically verifiable knowledge. Adequacy is crucial: the conduct assigned to a model must remain understandable to an everyday actor and that actor’s fellows. The essay reconciles abstraction with fidelity to subjective meaning. Scientific explanation need not recreate whole persons, but its models must remain accountable to the interpretations through which people make their social world intelligible.