Felix Kaufmann’s Review of Alfred Schütz’s Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (1932)

Felix Kaufmann’s book review presents Schütz’s Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt as a major contribution to the foundations of interpretive sociology. Its central judgment is that Schütz advances Max Weber’s programme by examining what Weber largely presupposed: the constitution of meaning and the possibility of understanding others. Kaufmann follows the book’s five-part progression from individual temporal experience to the structure of the social world and the methodological problems of sociology. His praise rests on a specific claim: these deeper investigations resolve difficulties within social-scientific method, rather than merely supplying an additional philosophical justification.

The review begins by locating Weber within the earlier debate over sociology’s independence and distinctive methods. Simmel’s sociology, Dilthey’s account of understanding, and Windelband and Rickert’s distinction between natural-scientific and cultural-scientific methods provide the background. Weber’s decisive achievement was to move beyond demands for a science of society and actually describe social action, social relations, and social formations. For Kaufmann, this established a route out of social metaphysics toward methodologically self-conscious inquiry. Schütz continues that route while questioning its underlying assumptions:

Er will den von Max Weber gelegten Stollen in größere Tiefen vortreiben, um von dort her schlackenreine Erkenntnisse über die Struktur des Sozialen und die Methoden der Sozialwissenschaften zutage zu fördern.

English translation: He seeks to drive the gallery opened by Max Weber into greater depths, in order to bring to light from there insights, free of dross, into the structure of the social and the methods of the social sciences.

The mining metaphor expresses continuity as well as criticism. Weber rightly placed meaning and the understanding of others at sociology’s centre, but treated them as irreducible givens whose varieties could be investigated without asking how they were constituted. Kaufmann endorses Schütz’s contention that this leaves important methodological problems unresolved.

The first section introduces the connection between meaning and inner duration, drawing on Bergson’s and Husserl’s analyses of temporal consciousness. Meaning is not simply an attribute already attached to an experience as it occurs:

Dabei ergibt sich nämlich, daß meine Handlung dadurch und nur dadurch einen Sinn erhält, daß ich mich ihr — der vergangenen — in einer spezifischen Weise zuwende und sie dadurch aus dem Erlebnisstrom heraushebe.

English translation: It emerges here that my action acquires meaning through, and only through, my turning toward it—the past action—in a specific way and thereby lifting it out of the stream of experience.

This retrospective orientation supplies the basis for the second section’s investigation of meaningful experience within one’s own duration, before the problem of other minds is introduced. Kaufmann highlights the distinctions between behaviour and action, between “in-order-to” motives and genuine “because” motives, and the connection between problem and interest. He regards the latter as potentially correcting and deepening the sociology of knowledge and historicism, but deliberately refrains from reproducing conclusions whose meaning depends on the detailed analyses supporting them.

One distinction nevertheless receives an explanation: action differs from other behaviour because it follows a project in which the action is anticipated as already completed and available to reflection. Its unity depends on the scope of that project. Kaufmann points to possible consequences for criminal jurisprudence without developing them. The review thus identifies practical methodological implications while preserving the dependence of these concepts on Schütz’s account of temporal experience.

The third section transfers this analytical groundwork to understanding others. Kaufmann judges it a substantial advance over investigations by Dilthey, Lipps, Spranger, Scheler, and others because it systematically performs the component analyses required by the problem. Its particular achievement is a precise account of the relationship between subjective and objective meaning. These investigations prepare the fourth, central section: social reality is constituted through interconnected acts of understanding others, so its structure cannot be adequately described without first clarifying those acts.

Schütz’s renewed examination of Weber’s definitions distinguishes the judgments of participants in a social relationship from those of an observer outside it. Kaufmann treats this distinction as a significant omission in Weber’s account. More generally:

Allgemein zeigt sich, daß die Grundstruktur der sozialen Welt eine kompliziertere ist, als von Max Weber angenommen (bzw. berücksichtigt) wurde, und daß hierbei die Zeit als entscheidendes Strukturprinzip auftritt.

English translation: In general, it becomes apparent that the basic structure of the social world is more complex than Max Weber assumed (or took into account), and that time emerges here as the decisive structural principle.

The resulting differentiation comprises the immediate social environment, the world of contemporaries, the world of predecessors, and a world of successors that remains largely unanalysed. In immediate relations, people are bodily present to one another in spatial and temporal proximity. Relations among contemporaries lack this immediacy, although partners indirectly know of one another’s simultaneous conscious experience. Kaufmann stresses that analysing this mediated relation makes ideal-type construction—and sociology’s distinctive orientation toward its object—intelligible. Analysis of predecessors, meanwhile, clarifies the tasks and limits of historical inquiry.

The fifth section applies the preceding results to remaining problems of interpretive sociology, especially the ideal type’s heuristic function, causal and meaning adequacy, and objective and subjective chance. Kaufmann closes with an emphatic assessment:

Ich halte das Werk von Schütz für eine wissenschaftstheoretische Leistung von hohem Range, der nachhaltige geistige Wirkung beschieden sein sollte.

English translation: I regard Schütz’s work as an achievement of high rank in the theory of science, one that should have a lasting intellectual influence.

He attributes the difficulty of the book to the depth of its problems, not obscurity of exposition, praising its organization and memorable examples. The review’s governing argument is therefore that Schütz makes Weberian sociology more rigorous by grounding its concepts in temporal experience and differentiated relations of understanding. Its significance lies in connecting philosophical analysis directly to the construction and limits of social-scientific knowledge.