1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When we project an action, we do not picture it unfolding phase by phase; we imagine the deed as already accomplished and reconstruct backward the means that will have produced it—anticipation in the future perfect, modo futuri exacti. On this temporal insight Schütz builds an anatomy of everyday deliberation, distinguishing action from completed act, the future-directed in-order-to motive from the retrospectively disclosed because-motive, and mere fancying from a project disciplined by what the actor takes to be feasible. Choice becomes possible only when doubt turns open possibilities into competing problematic ones, weighted against each other; here he threads Husserl, Bergson's durée, and Leibniz's antecedent and final volitions. But weight derives from higher systems of plans reaching to the life-plan itself, so perfectly rational choice in daily life proves impossible—a limit that both bounds and licenses the objectifying models of social science.
I can choose only between projects which stand to choice.
Santayana's late Dominations and Powers arrives not as a policy book but as a philosophical anthropology of how society and government grow from human beings living among powers and necessities—and Schütz reads it as a tractatus ethico-politicus written from theoretical detachment rather than partisan advocacy. The governing distinction between dominations and powers is moral, not physical: all dominations wield power, but only some powers harden into command. Grounding Santayana's precise naturalism in animal faith and the Lebenswelt, Schütz follows the triad of generative, militant, and rational orders—family and custom, the will to impose through party, propaganda, commerce, and bureaucracy, and reason's fragile adaptation to circumstance. He shares the diagnosis of technological and bureaucratic domination, yet objects to the metaphysical priority granted the generative order and to the treatment of arts unrelated to nourishment as parasitic.
Herrschaft ist ein besonderes Organ der Gesellschaft, sie hat ihr eigenes Leben, sie ist immer böse und manchmal gut, wie der Krieg.
English translation: “Government is a special organ of society; it has its own life, it is always evil and sometimes good, like war.”
There are, strictly speaking, no facts pure and simple: both common sense and science select and interpret a world according to purpose and relevance. From that anti-positivist premise Schütz derives the defining problem of social science—its objects already interpret themselves, so the scholar's models are second-degree constructs built upon the first-order constructs by which people understand their everyday lives. He maps the intersubjective lifeworld through typification, the reciprocity of perspectives, the social distribution of knowledge, and relations of We, You, and They, then anatomizes action as projected conduct governed by in-order-to and because-motives. Full rationality, he insists, is not a feature of ordinary conduct but a methodological device: the scientist builds puppet-like homunculi endowed only with the relevances his problem requires. Valid constructs must satisfy logical consistency, subjective interpretation, and adequacy—the scientist standing to his creatures, in the closing image, as a god to his.
The thought objects constructed by the social scientists refer to and are founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thought of man living his everyday life among his fellowmen.
Husserl withheld the second volume of his Ideen from print because the problem of intersubjectivity remained unsolved, and this posthumously edited text, reconstructed at the Louvain archive, exposes the difficulty rather than resolving it. Schütz follows its architecture from material things, whose reality he ties inseparably to causality, through the lived body and its "I can," to the moment where empathy makes the world shareable and every objectivity turns out to presuppose intersubjectivity. In the region of spirit, motivation displaces physical causality, and persons live among tools, works, and institutions rather than neutral objects. Husserl's boldest claim, that spirit holds ontological priority over a nature relative to consciousness, sets the stage; Schütz closes by marking the unfinished analyses of communication and collectivity as the book's weakest, and most consequential, seams.
Die Natur ist prinzipiell relativ, der Geist prinzipiell irrelativ (absolut).
English translation: “Nature is in principle relative, spirit in principle non-relative (absolute).”
Drafted in 1912 beside Ideen I and never rewritten by Husserl or his assistants, the earliest of the three Ideen volumes reads, in Schütz's hands, as a preliminary to the harder second volume and as a manifesto for grounding empirical science. Its subject is the ordering of regions, material thing, animate body, soul, and the claim that every empirical discipline works within an a priori regional framework it cannot itself clarify. Eidetic science, Husserl argues, precedes the empirical; psychology therefore needs a rational, essential counterpart, and the objectivity of nature is constituted only among embodied egos in reciprocal communication. Schütz gives special weight to the final chapter on Klärung, the tracing of technically useful constructions back to intuitive givenness, and to Husserl's insistence that phenomenology grounds the sciences without ever replacing them.
So ist die Phänomenologie der Nährboden, aus dem alle ontologischen Einsichten erwachsen.
English translation: “Thus phenomenology is the fertile soil from which all ontological insights grow.”
The mid-century quarrel over whether social science must borrow the methods of physics or invent its own is, for Schütz, badly posed. Empirical inquiry everywhere shares standards of controlled inference, verification, and generality; what differs is the object. Against Ernest Nagel's positivist attack on Weberian Verstehen, and against the equation of experience with sense-observation, he insists that naturalism silently takes for granted the very thing it should explain, the intersubjective, already-interpreted social world. Understanding is first an everyday mode of experience, not a scholar's private intuition. The methodological consequence is exacting: social-scientific concepts must be second-order constructs raised upon the first-order typifications of ordinary actors, and the theorist populates models with "homunculi" endowed only with the motives a problem requires, disciplined by logical consistency and adequacy to lived understanding.
Das Hauptziel der Sozialwissenschaften ist es, geordnetes Wissen von sozialer Wirklichkeit zu gewinnen.
English translation: “The chief aim of the social sciences is to obtain organized knowledge of social reality.”
Appresentation, Husserl's name for the pairing by which something present makes something absent, hidden, or transcendent co-present, becomes the master key to a general theory of signs and symbols. Schütz assembles a graded scale: private mnemonic marks that recover a past intention, indications like smoke for fire, signs proper that carry another person's experience across the intersubjective world, and finally symbols, which alone reach beyond everyday life. Reworking William James's sub-universes into closed provinces of meaning, dream, play, art, science, religion, he argues that the paramount reality is the only sphere in which bodies act, resist, and communicate, and that a symbol is precisely a worldly vehicle appresenting a meaning that belongs to another province. Society itself, its nations, offices, and institutions, is grasped only through such symbolic forms; humankind is animal symbolicum.
Es gibt keine Bestandteile der Erfahrung, die nur Symbole oder nur Bedeutungen sind.
English translation: “There are no components of experience that are only symbols or only meanings.”
Borrowing Friedrich Gundolf's method of tracing a great figure through the history of his fame, Schütz asks what philosophy has been able to hear in Mozart's operas, and what it distorts. Hermann Cohen reads them through love as pure feeling; Kierkegaard concentrates the musical-erotic in Don Giovanni; Wilhelm Dilthey comes closest to a hermeneutics of dramatic form. Against all three, and against the assumption that Mozart's figures are stable characters like Wagner's, Schütz contends that they "act character" within closed musical situations rather than developing as unified personalities. Recitative, orchestra, and ensemble translate visible stage action into inner time and make social simultaneity audible, an intersubjective "we." The true theme, he concludes, is not love but the metaphysical mystery of human sociality, music, in Schopenhauer's phrase, as hidden metaphysics.
Die Musik jedoch ist ein Prozeß, der in der Dimension der inneren Zeit, in der Durée, wie Bergson sie nennt, stattfindet.
English translation: “The action on the stage takes place before our eyes in outer space and outer time. Music, however, is a process that unfolds in the dimension of inner time, in the durée, as Bergson calls it.”
Within the primordial sphere of ownness, Husserl set out in the fifth Cartesian Meditation to defeat solipsism: bracket everything foreign, apprehend the other's body analogically as another living body, and from there build up common nature, common time, and the community of monads. Schütz's immanent critique is that each step tacitly relies on what it claims to generate. My own body is lived kinesthetically, not perceived as one object among others, so the similarity that analogical transfer demands is already compromised; and communication cannot supply the missing bridge, since every gesture and sign already operates within the common world it was supposed to build. The elementary phenomenon, he argues, is the We-relation. Intersubjectivity is not a problem the transcendental ego can solve but a given of the life-world, and the attempt to create a world-for-everyone from solitary subjectivity proves impossible.
Alle Kommunikation, ob es sich um eine sogenannte Ausdrucksbewegung, eine Zeigegeste, oder den Gebrauch visueller oder akustischer Zeichen handelt, setzt bereits einen äußeren Vorgang in eben jener gemeinsamen Umwelt voraus, die nach Husserl erst durch die Kommunikation konstituiert werden soll.
English translation: “All communication—whether it involves a so-called expressive movement, a pointing gesture, or the use of visual or acoustic signs—already presupposes an external process within precisely that common environment which, according to Husserl, is only to be constituted through communication.”
No person is equal or unequal in himself, Schütz insists; comparison always presupposes a problem, an interest, and a domain of relevance within which selected traits count. Equality, on this account, is not homogeneity, and confusion begins the moment distinct relevance-domains are forced onto a single scale, a man may be equal as a citizen, unequal in wealth, and incomparable as a friend. From Plato's arithmetical and geometrical equality and Aristotle's flute-players, Schütz turns the question over to the sociology of knowledge: every group inherits its own hierarchy of relevances and legitimates it through a central myth. The distinction between subjective and objective meaning then drives his analysis of discrimination, minority rights, and equal opportunity, domination beginning when one imposed trait, race or origin or creed, is made to stand for the whole person.
Typisieren heißt, das zu übergehen, was das Individuum einmalig und unersetzbar macht.
English translation: “To typify means to pass over what makes the individual unique and irreplaceable.”
Value, on this reading, is an objective and eternal quality grasped in feeling as color is grasped in sight, the thesis Schütz places at the center of Scheler, Husserl's most original successor. The study moves in two arcs. First an epistemology that treats phenomenology as an attitude of eidetic seeing and distinguishes natural, scientific, and phenomenological facts, crowned by the doctrine of three kinds of knowledge: knowledge of control, of essence, and of salvation. Then a material ethics built against Kant, whose formal law Scheler charges with mistaking every material content for the merely empirical, and so excluding love, sympathy, and emotional moral insight. Values form a hierarchy, sensory, vital, spiritual, holy, disclosed in preferring; obligation is grounded in value, never the reverse; and the person, a non-objectifiable center of acts, bears moral worth first of all.
Das emotionale Leben hat auch seinen ursprünglich apriorischen Gehalt, der unserer eidetischen Anschauung zugänglich ist und der eine Phänomenologie des emotionalen Lebens und damit eine Phänomenologie der Werte ermöglicht.
English translation: “Emotional life, too, has its own originally a priori content, which is accessible to our eidetic intuition and which makes possible a phenomenology of emotional life and thus a phenomenology of values.”
To be responsible for a deed and to be responsible to an authority are, Schütz shows, two different relations, and confusing them makes responsibility look simpler than it is. A further ambiguity divides third-person imputation from first-person experience: where no one else calls me to account, responsibility appears instead as remorse, guilt, and the anguish of an irreversible past. Drawing on Weber's contrast between subjective and objective meaning, this short essay follows the concept as it fractures across laws, duties, determinism, and the deeds of groups. A law means one thing to the legislator, another to the offender or the court; duty shifts when self-imposed rather than laid on from without. Antigone, Orestes, the atomic scientists, and the Nuremberg defendants each mark the gap between what an authority may demand and what an agent inwardly answers for.
Eines ist es, wenn in den Nürnberger Prozessen die Naziführer von den Alliierten zur Verantwortung gezogen werden, und ganz etwas anderes ist es, wenn sie vom deutschen Volk verantwortlich gemacht worden wären.
English translation: “It is one thing when, at the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi leaders are held to account by the Allies, and quite another when they would have been held responsible by the German people.”