1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Reviewing Husserl's newly published Cartesian Meditations—still available only in French—Schütz reads it as an attempt to ground all philosophy in transcendental subjectivity, taking up Descartes's radical doubt while correcting its errors through the epoché and the phenomenological reduction. He follows Husserl's analyses of intentionality, the noetic-noematic correlation, and the transcendental ego as a monadic field structured by habitualities and passive genesis. Special weight falls on the difficult fifth meditation and its account of how the alter ego is constituted through appresentation and pairing, yielding an objective world valid for everyone. Schütz marks the work's transcendental idealism and its opposition to psychologism, points toward the tasks it opens for a phenomenologically grounded social science, and closes with the wish that Husserl make the book available to German readers.
„Gegenstände“ sind daher – in der reduzierten Sphäre sowohl als auch in der natürlichen Einstellung – nichts anderes als intentionale Korrelate ihrer Bewußtseinsweisen.
English translation: “Objects" are therefore – in the reduced sphere as well as in the natural attitude – nothing other than intentional correlates of their modes of consciousness.”
A brief private note, written two days before Christmas 1937, catches Alfred Schütz in an ordinary moment between his phenomenological labors. Just back from Paris, he has carried home an issue of the Revue de Paris for its essay by Paul Valéry, which he presses on his correspondent with the request that it be returned once read. He adds a book as a Christmas gift, should the friend not already own it, and sends warm wishes to him and his wife. Slight in itself, the letter survives as a small biographical trace of the émigré scholar's Parisian ties and reading life on the eve of war—a fragment of correspondence rather than a work of theory.
What began as a 4,000-word review for Economica, commissioned by Hayek, had swollen into a 20,000-word analysis—"a monster," Schütz calls it—of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. This 1940 letter opens the celebrated transatlantic exchange between the émigré phenomenologist and the Harvard theorist of social action. Schütz reports reading Parsons's unpublished second manuscript three times, reserves his sharpest comments for an oral meeting he proposes in New York or Cambridge, and presses gently on their differences over the foundations of a theory of action. He encloses his essay "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences" from Farber's Husserl memorial volume and mentions his forthcoming paper on William James, folding a personal letter into a document at the crossroads of phenomenology and American sociology.
Ich verdanke Ihren Theorien auch dort unendlich viel Gewinn und Anregung, wo ich von ihnen abweiche.
English translation: “I owe your theories an infinite amount of profit and stimulation, even where I depart from them.”
What can Husserl's phenomenology actually offer the social sciences? Schütz's programmatic essay answers by first indicting mathematical natural science for forgetting the lifeworld and the constituting subjectivity on which it silently rests. Organized around four guiding problems—the epoché's retention of the world, the constitution of the alter ego against solipsism, the critique of naturalism, and the grounding of social inquiry—it separates transcendental constitution from the mundane intersubjectivity that cultural and social science actually study. What these disciplines need, he argues, is not a Lockean catalogue of mental states but an eidetic, constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude. Charting the lifeworld's structures of Umwelt, Mitwelt, Vorwelt, and Folgewelt, he concludes that Max Weber's interpretive sociology and its ideal type still await precisely this foundation.
Die phänomenologische Philosophie ist vor allem eine Philosophie des Menschen.
English translation: “Phenomenological philosophy is above all a philosophy of man.”
Neither to make William James a phenomenologist nor to turn Husserl into a pragmatist: Schütz's aim is to locate the ground the two secretly share. He finds it in the reality of personal consciousness and the unbroken continuity of the stream of thought, set against the associationist atomism of Locke, Hume, and Mill. Reading James's famous "fringes" as anticipations of Husserl's inner and outer horizons, he aligns the substantive and transitive parts of thought with retention and anticipation in inner time-consciousness, and matches James's trains of thought with Husserl's polythetic syntheses that can afterward be grasped as a single monothetic object. James's doctrine of fringes, he concludes, tells for conceptualism against nominalism and opens a distinctively American route into phenomenology.
Zukünftige Historiker der Philosophie werden sicher zustimmen, daß hauptsächlich das Denken dreier Philosophen mitgeholfen hat, den gegenwärtigen Stil des Philosophierens umzugestalten: James, Bergson und Husserl.
English translation: “Future historians of philosophy will certainly agree that the thought of three philosophers above all has helped to reshape the present style of philosophizing: James, Bergson, and Husserl.”
Reach another mind, and you cannot do it by reading a body as an outward clue to a hidden soul—for if personhood consists in the very execution of its acts, the other must be met in the act itself. Schütz reconstructs Max Scheler's theory of intersubjectivity, its hierarchy of psychic life from drive to spirit and its rejection of both analogical inference and empathy, then charges Scheler with answering a transcendental question through metaphysical hypotheses about an undifferentiated supra-individual stream. Finding Husserl's Fifth Cartesian Meditation equally wanting, he turns to the mundane natural attitude and makes his decisive move temporal: self-consciousness is possible only modo praeterito, in the past tense, while another's speech and action can be followed in a shared living present. The alter ego is thus no substance inferred behind gestures but a second stream, growing older alongside one's own.
Das alter ego ist der subjektive Gedankenstrom, der in seiner lebendigen Gegenwart erlebt werden kann.
English translation: “The alter ego is the subjective stream of thought which can be experienced in its living present.”
Rationality, on the common assumption, is the standard by which ordinary conduct should be measured; Schütz insists instead that it has its proper home on the theoretical plane of social science, not in the street. Beginning from Talcott Parsons's definition of rational action as the intelligible choice of adequate means to ends, he separates the planes of experience—native, stranger, cartographer; actor, observer, theorist—and warns that a concept cannot cross between them unchanged. Everyday life runs on what he names 'cookbook knowledge': approximate recipes and typifications that work well enough, following Dewey's account of deliberation as imaginative rehearsal. Full rational choice would demand impossible foreknowledge of aims, means, and others' reactions. Rationality returns only when the observer replaces living actors with Weberian ideal-type puppets, endowed with just the motives the scientific problem requires.
Die Methodologie ist nicht der Lehrmeister oder der Tutor des Wissenschaftlers.
English translation: “Methodology is not the teacher or the tutor of the scientist.”
To join a group as an adult is to discover that its world cannot simply be adopted like a coat. Taking the immigrant as his exemplary case, Schütz examines the newcomer who seeks lasting acceptance and finds that the host culture's 'thinking-as-usual'—its trusted recipes for interpreting and acting—rests on assumptions he does not share. Its history is available to him as history, not as lived biography, so to the group he is a person without history. He must test each recipe as mere subjective probability, misreading anonymity and intimacy alike into pseudo-intimacy and pseudo-anonymity. Language marks the limit sharply, for expressive mastery lies not in vocabulary and grammar but in connotation, idiom, and shared memory. The stranger's celebrated objectivity is forced explicitness born from the collapse of the taken-for-granted; belonging, Schütz shows, is an epistemic achievement, not a legal status.
Er ist wesentlich der Mensch, der fast alles, das den Mitgliedern der Gruppe, der er sich nähert, unfraglich erscheint, in Frage stellt.
English translation: “He is essentially the man who calls into question nearly everything that appears unquestionable to the members of the group he is approaching.”
Borrowing William James's notion of many sub-universes of reality, Schütz asks not which worlds exist but how each becomes real for consciousness. Everyday life is the paramount reality—inherited, intersubjective, resistant, practically urgent—and within it he gives 'working' (Wirken), action planned in advance and carried out bodily, the privileged place where inner duration, public time, and social reciprocity intersect. Around it lie other finite provinces of meaning, each with its own cognitive style: the worlds of phantasy, of dreaming, and of scientific theory, whose aim is not to master the world but to observe it. One does not glide between them but crosses by a leap or shock—falling asleep, entering play, adopting detachment. Beneath every everyday relevance he locates a fundamental anxiety, the knowledge that one will die, alongside the epoché of the natural attitude that brackets not the world but doubt of it.
Unter allen beschriebenen Formen der Spontaneität ist das Wirken für die Konstitution der Wirklichkeit der alltäglichen Welt die wichtigste.
English translation: “Of all the forms of spontaneity described, working is the most important for the constitution of the reality of the everyday world.”
No one in modern society, Schütz begins, can comprehend the whole of the world he depends on; we use technologies, markets, and legal orders through trust and routine rather than understanding. From this he builds a sociology of how knowledge is socially distributed, sorted through three ideal types: the expert, whose clear knowledge is narrow; the man on the street, content with recipes and feeling; and the well-informed citizen, who seeks reasonably grounded opinions on what concerns him indirectly. His engine is a theory of relevance—zones of interest shifting like contour lines, and chosen 'essential' relevances set against 'imposed' ones that arrive from anonymous powers. Since most of what we know is socially derived, he distinguishes eyewitness, insider, analyst, and commentator. The essay ends as a democratic warning: opinion polling can elevate the uninformed and press sanctioned ignorance on those who know better.
Wir besitzen immer weniger das Recht zu definieren, was für uns relevant ist und was nicht.
English translation: “We possess less and less the right to define what is relevant for us and what is not.”
Another person enters my field and looks at me: the world that was arranged around me reorganizes around a point of view not my own, and I become an object capable of shame. Reconstructing Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of intersubjectivity, Schütz treats it as separable from existentialism and grants it real power—the gaze, being-for-the-Other, the three dimensions of the lived and objectified body, and the critiques of Husserl, Hegel, and Heidegger whose anonymous Mitsein never reaches the concrete Peter or Anny. Yet Sartre's brilliance ends, he argues, in a practical solipsism: an opposition of subject and object that leaves either me objectified by the Other or the Other objectified by me, and no genuine subject-to-subject relation between them. Against the keyhole scene Schütz sets speech, where Peter's speaking presupposes Paul's listening—the mutual tuning-in Sartre's philosophy cannot house.
The Other is not only he whom I see, but also he who sees me.
A patient with cortical injury may still pronounce the word 'knife' yet be unable to use it as a category, naming it instead by situation as a 'pencil-sharpener' or 'apple-peeler.' From Kurt Goldstein's clinical theory of aphasia, and its distinction between concrete and abstract or categorial comportment, Schütz draws a phenomenology of the lifeworld. Against atomistic localization, he reads speech disorder as a disturbance of the whole person's relation to the world, and stages a convergence of Bergson, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, and Gurwitsch before grounding the matter, with Husserl, in pre-predicative experience. His own move recasts Goldstein's 'attitudes' as differing systems of relevance and typification: as attention to life diminishes, the specious present contracts toward the immediately given, horizons close, and names cease to carry open symbolic generality. Breakdowns of speech thereby disclose the typifications by which people ordinarily inhabit a common reality.
Aphasie, Agnosie und Apraxie sind eng verwandt, und bei allen dreien ist die sogenannte kategoriale Einstellung beeinträchtigt.
English translation: “Aphasia, agnosia, and apraxia are closely related, and in all three the so-called categorial attitude is impaired.”