1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Although Husserl never engaged the concrete problems of the social sciences, his analyses of intersubjectivity, inner time-consciousness, appresentation, and typification supply, on Schütz's account, exactly the tools those sciences lack. The essay first clears away hasty appropriations, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, and the early Scheler among them, and reads Ortega y Gasset's insistence on the ego's radical solitude as exposing the unresolved circularity in Husserl's constitution of the alter ego. The decisive move is to relocate Husserl's importance from transcendental theory to the natural attitude, the pregiven world taken as self-evident until called into question. Linking Husserl to Weber's problem of meaningful action, Schütz sketches a program, sedimented stocks of knowledge, relevance, reciprocity of perspectives, signs and symbols, and concludes that social science belongs to a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, not a transcendental one.
Max Weber hat gezeigt, daß alle Phänomene der soziokulturellen Welt in sozialem Handeln gründen und auf soziales Handeln zurückverwiesen werden können.
English translation: “Max Weber has shown that all phenomena of the socio-cultural world are grounded in social action and can be traced back to social action.”
The blind Theban seer knew things to come yet could change none of them, and in that useless certainty Schütz finds the perfect foil for a phenomenology of anticipation. Testing the seer against the playwright, the historian, and Laplace's calculating demon, he shows that flawless foreknowledge in a finite mind is simply incoherent. Ordinary humans predict differently: from a socially inherited stock of knowledge at hand, we grasp coming events only as types, trusting the idealizations 'and so forth' and 'I can do it again' until they explode against experience. Action reaches still further, projecting a completed deed in the future perfect, modo futuri exacti, so that foresight becomes a kind of anticipated hindsight, open until the event occurs. The essay closes on the Socratic prayer that we be spared the goods we mistakenly ask for.
"A fearful thing is knowledge, when to know helpeth no end," says Tiresias in Sophocles' Oedipus, King of Thebes.
Between the type that everyday perception already imposes and the essence phenomenology hopes to intuit, Schütz locates a boundary that refuses to stay firm. Taking up Eugen Fink's distinction between thematic and merely operative concepts, he argues that Husserl's late notions of Typik and Eidos do real work without ever being fully clarified. A thing is met not as bare datum but as 'a dog' or 'a tool,' within horizons of expectation sedimented through association and passive synthesis. Husserl's eidetic method would rise above such contingency by varying an example freely in imagination until an invariant essence appears; yet if the starting example is already typified by the lifeworld, Schütz asks whether the variation is free at all. Ideation may disclose nothing the type had not already prepared, leaving eidetic reduction itself an operative, unfinished procedure.
Die Ideation kann dann nichts anderes enthüllen, was nicht schon im Typus vorkonstituiert war.
English translation: “Ideation can then reveal nothing that was not already preconstituted in the type.”
Strip the acting, interpreting person out of social science, and its objective schemes, institution, group, market, quietly turn misleading. Against behaviorism, which describes social facts wholly from outside while secretly presupposing language and mutual understanding, Schütz defends the subjective standpoint: the social world is already organized by participants as meaningful. Behavior becomes action only through a projected act, so understanding others means reconstructing their typified motives, the future-directed Um-zu and the biographically rooted Weil. Interaction adds reciprocity, modeled on the exchange of question and answer, where each project reckons with the other's response. Yet subjective meaning can still be studied scientifically, Schütz insists, through ideal-typical constructs: model actors endowed only with the knowledge and motives a problem requires, disciplined by relevance, consistency, and adequacy to the everyday life-world to which they must remain answerable.
Der Prototyp jeder sozialen Beziehung ist eine intersubjektive Motivkette.
English translation: “The prototype of every social relationship is an intersubjective chain of motives.”
An object glimpsed in a dark corner might be a coiled rope or a snake, the ancient example, drawn from the skeptic Carneades, through which Schütz unfolds his theory of relevance. Why anything at all steps forward from the taken-for-granted field, how the stock of knowledge selects the types that interpret it, and why the interpretation matters for what one is about to do: these he sorts into thematic, interpretive, and motivational relevance, three aspects of a single phenomenon. Around them he builds a phenomenology of the natural attitude, sedimentation, familiarity and strangeness, embodiment, the 'empty place' whose unknown contents are already prefigured by their contours. Left unfinished at his death and here rendered into German from the English reflections of 1970, the manuscript reads as the hidden architecture beneath all his work on the life-world.
Die vorgängige Aufgliederung in Thema und Horizont ist die Grundlage für jede Geistestätigkeit.
English translation: “The prior articulation into theme and horizon is the foundation of all mental activity.”
Two silent idealizations, Husserl's 'und so weiter' and 'ich kann immer wieder,' hold the everyday world together, and Schütz sets out to show how revocable that stability really is. The life-world is stratified: into zones of actual, restorable, and attainable reach, and into social layers running from the face-to-face Umwelt outward through anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Knowledge within it is unevenly distributed and largely inherited as recipes, maxims, and language. What orders the whole is relevance, motivational, thematic, interpretive, by which a life-plan selects interests, a failed routine turns something into a problem, and sedimented knowledge becomes pertinent to solving it. Because types are never neutral labels but deposits of earlier inquiries, the same world admits magical, theological, or scientific reading. Presented here in German translation of the 1966 English essay, the study makes relevance foundational for the social sciences.
Alle Typisierung ist problemrelativ, es gibt somit keinen Typus schlechtweg, sondern nur Typen, die einen problem-verweisenden „Index" mit sich führen.
English translation: “All typification is problem-relative; there is thus no type as such, but only types that carry with them a problem-referring "index.”
Max Weber demanded that sociology understand action through its subjective meaning, but never explained what such meaning is, how it arises in lived experience, or how anyone else could grasp it. First published in 1932, this is the book that supplies the missing foundation. Drawing on Bergson and Husserl, Schütz argues that meaning is no hidden mental substance but an act of self-interpretation: an experience becomes meaningful only when reflection lifts it, already elapsed, out of the stream of inner time. From there he rebuilds the whole edifice, the projected act with its Um-zu and Weil motives, the understanding of others through signs and typifications, and a graded social world reaching from the intimate We of consociates to the anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors whose meanings we can no longer revise. Scientific sociology, he concludes, constructs ideal types that must stay answerable to the actor's own meaning.
Gemeinter Sinn eines Erlebnisses ist nichts anderes als eine Selbstauslegung des Erlebnisses von einem neuen Erleben her.
English translation: “The intended meaning of a lived experience is nothing other than a self-interpretation of that experience from the standpoint of a new experience.”