Alfred Schutz asked a question that most sociology had passed over: how is the ordinary social world possible at all? Max Weber had made subjective meaning the object of sociology but had treated the meaningful act as a starting point rather than a problem. Schutz turned it into the problem, using Husserl's phenomenology to describe the life-world — the everyday reality that ordinary people inhabit, take for granted and never think to question.
His answer is that social order rests on a vast, unnoticed apparatus of shared common-sense knowledge: typifications that let us treat this person as a postman and that object as a letterbox, and the natural attitude in which we suspend all doubt that the world is much as it appears and much as it appears to others. Sociology, on this account, does not begin with structures or with variables. It begins with the constitution of meaning in the flow of everyday life, and its scientific constructs are second-order constructs built on the first-order constructs of the people it studies.
Life and intellectual formation
Schutz was born in Vienna in 1899, served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War, and read law and social science at the University of Vienna in the extraordinary interwar milieu of Hans Kelsen and the Austrian economists, Ludwig von Mises among them. He never held an ordinary academic post in Europe. He earned his living in banking and international finance, and did philosophy in the evenings and on trains — the reason he is sometimes described as sociology's great part-time thinker.
His first book, published in German in 1932 and translated much later as The Phenomenology of the Social World, was written explicitly to give Weber's sociology the philosophical foundation Schutz thought it lacked. It brought him to Husserl's attention, and the two corresponded and met; Husserl invited him to Freiburg as an assistant, an offer circumstances prevented him from taking up.
The Anschluss of 1938 forced him out. He reached New York in 1939 by way of Paris, continued in business, and from 1943 taught at the New School for Social Research, where his students included Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann and where he encountered American pragmatism, especially William James, George Herbert Mead and John Dewey. His work after 1940 appears almost entirely as essays, collected posthumously; the systematic treatise he planned was completed from his manuscripts by Luckmann as The Structures of the Life-World.
The life-world and the natural attitude
The Lebenswelt is the world of daily life: the paramount reality in which we work, meet others, use objects and pursue projects. Its features are not exotic but they are precise. It is centred on my body as a here from which distances and reaches are measured; it is stratified into zones of actual, restorable and attainable reach; it is a world of practical concerns organised around what Schutz called the pragmatic motive; and it is from the outset intersubjective — never my private world, always one I take to be shared.
The natural attitude is the stance in which we live it. In this attitude we do not doubt that the world exists independently of us, that it will continue tomorrow as it was yesterday, that the same means will produce the same ends, and that others perceive it as we do. Following Husserl, Schutz called this the suspension of doubt, or the epoché of the natural attitude — a reversal worth noting, since the philosopher brackets belief in the world whereas the ordinary person brackets doubt about it. Sociologically this is decisive: the stability of society is secured less by norms and sanctions than by the fact that its members have never seriously considered the alternative.
Typifications and the stock of knowledge at hand
Nobody encounters the world as a stream of unique particulars. Each of us carries a stock of knowledge at hand — recipes, maxims, rules of thumb, expectations, classifications — inherited from parents, teachers and predecessors and sedimented from our own biography. Schutz stressed how little of it is systematic: it is incoherent, only partially clear, and held without full conviction, yet entirely sufficient for practical purposes. The knowledge of everyday life is knowledge of recipes, not of principles.
Its working units are typifications. Language itself is a vast repository of types, so that in learning words a child inherits ready-made classifications of persons, motives and situations. Schutz distinguished personal types, the typical courses of conduct we attribute to a typical person, and course-of-action types, the typical acts through which such conduct proceeds. He also mapped how social knowledge is distributed rather than shared equally, sketching the figures of the expert, the well-informed citizen and the man on the street.
Two idealisations hold the whole structure together, jointly forming what Schutz called the general thesis of the alter ego and the reciprocity of perspectives. The idealisation of the interchangeability of standpoints assumes that if I were there and you here, I would see what you see; the idealisation of the congruency of relevance systems assumes that our differences of biography do not matter for present practical purposes. Because both are routinely assumed, strangers can cooperate without ever comparing their inner experiences.
Motives, relationships and multiple realities
Schutz's account of action turns on a distinction blurred in ordinary speech. An in-order-to motive looks forward: it is the projected future state for the sake of which the actor acts, and it belongs to the actor's own perspective while acting. A because-motive looks back: it explains the project itself by reference to past experiences and settled dispositions, and it is available only retrospectively, whether by the actor reflecting on a completed act or by an observer. Both may be true of the same act, but they answer different questions, and treating a because-motive as though it were the actor's reason is one of the commonest errors in social explanation.
Schutz mapped the social world in the same spirit, distinguishing the world of directly experienced consociates in a face-to-face we-relation, the world of contemporaries known only as types, the world of predecessors which can be understood but not influenced, and the world of successors which can be influenced but not known.
His essay on multiple realities extended the analysis beyond daily life. The world of working is paramount but not the only finite province of meaning: dreams, fantasy, the theatre, scientific theorising and religious experience each have their own style of lived experience, their own form of sociality and their own tension of consciousness. Moving between them requires a leap, and the shock of that leap — waking, the curtain falling — is a common experience.
Two celebrated essays made these ideas concrete. The Stranger analyses the newcomer whose inherited scheme of typifications fails, who must therefore make explicit what members take for granted, and whose consequent objectivity and doubtful loyalty are structural rather than personal. The Homecomer shows that return is harder than departure, because both the home that was left and the person returning have changed while each expected the other to have stood still.
Criticisms
Structural and Marxist critics object that a sociology of the taken-for-granted takes too much for granted. Describing how members sustain a sense of shared reality says nothing about who has the power to define that reality, and the life-world of the landlord and of the labourer are not symmetrical. Schutz's apparatus, on this reading, is subjectivist and apolitical, unable to reach class, state or inequality.
Methodological objections follow. His writings are almost entirely programmatic — dense conceptual analysis with virtually no empirical research — and the phenomenological reduction he inherited from Husserl is difficult to convert into procedures others can replicate. Critics also press the founding puzzle: if the reciprocity of perspectives is an idealisation that members merely assume, Schutz has described the belief in intersubjectivity rather than established it, a difficulty Husserl himself never fully solved. Others note the ahistorical cast of his descriptions, which present the structures of the life-world as universal where they may be those of a particular society, and question whether his elegant motive distinction can be applied to real cases without circularity.
Legacy
Schutz's influence is out of all proportion to his output. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann turned his framework into the sociology of knowledge of The Social Construction of Reality, whose account of habitualisation, institutions and legitimation is Schutzian throughout. Harold Garfinkel took the natural attitude as an empirical topic and founded ethnomethodology, studying how members actively accomplish the sense of an orderly world — the breaching demonstrations work precisely by disturbing what Schutz had described. Aaron Cicourel carried the critique into research method; Erving Goffman's frames and Giddens's practical consciousness draw on the same well; and phenomenological sociology remains the standard alternative to positivism in the discipline's methodological debates.
For the UPSC answer
Schutz belongs in any answer on non-positivist methodologies, on sociology and common sense, or on interpretive sociology after Weber. Anchor him with three terms defined exactly — life-world, natural attitude, typification — and add the reciprocity of perspectives as the mechanism by which private meanings become shared ones. Use the in-order-to versus because-motive distinction as your demonstration of analytical precision, and either the stranger or the homecomer as your illustration, since concrete examples are scarce in this area and examiners reward them. Place him in the line Weber to Schutz to Berger and Luckmann to Garfinkel, so the answer shows a tradition developing rather than a thinker in isolation. Conclude with the structural criticism that a sociology of the taken-for-granted brackets power and inequality precisely where they need explaining.
References & further reading
- Schutz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
- Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Schutz, A. (1964). Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
- Schutz, A., & Luckmann, T. (1973). The Structures of the Life-World. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
- Berger, P. L., & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday.
- Wagner, H. R. (1983). Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.