Alfred Schutz Biography

Vienna-born philosopher Alfred Schutz developed phenomenology, the study of the development of human consciousness and self-awareness into a sociological science. He was born on April 13, 1899, after the death of his father, Alfred. His mother, Johanna Fialla Schutz, married her husband's brother, Otto, a bank executive. During his school years, Schutz became interested in literature, music, and art. He graduated from Esterhazy Gymnasium and was drafted into the Austrian army at age 18. During World War I, he served on the Italian front.

After the war, Schutz entered the University of Vienna and studied law under Hans Kelsen, an Austrian and later American legal philosopher and teacher who formulated what is called the "pure theory" of law, meaning that law itself should be logically self-supporting. Schutz also studied economics under another Austrian-American, Ludwig von Mises, known for his contribution to liberalism in economic theory and his belief in the power of consumers. Schutz earned an LL.D. degree in international law, and in 1921, he became executive secretary of the Austrian Banker's Association. In 1926, he married Ilse Heim; they had two children.

Schutz joined the private banking firm of Reitler and Company in 1929 and remained there until his retirement in 1958. During those years, he devoted most of his evening free time to the social sciences. He became intensely interested in the theoretical aspects of human actions and relationships which led to the theories of German sociologist Max Weber and others. Weber is best known for his thesis of the "Protestant Ethic," relating protestantism to capitalism. When he found Weber's theories inadequate, he turned to Henri-Louis Bergson, a French philosopher noted for what he called a process philosophy, which rejected static values for values of change, motion, and evolution. Still searching for adequate self-understanding, Schutz eventually was led to the theories of German phenomenolgoist Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). Schutz came to regard himself as a close follower of Husserl and went briefly to Freiburg, Germany, to work with the older man.

The philosophical movement called phenomenology has been regarded as the direct investigation and description of phenomena as experienced consciously, as free as possible from preconceptions and presuppositions. It has gone through many changes since Husserl's theories, but most phenomenologists adhere to his watchword, translated as the phrase "to the things themselves," through which Husserl advocates bracketing our human presuppositions in order to directly experience things as they exist independently in the world. Schutz's first work on the subject is entitled The Meaningful Structure of the Social World, 1932. Called by some a masterpiece on the subject, it shows how actions become meaningful when projected and interpreted in relation to causes and purposes. It investigates how the self relates to others, to close associates who act upon one another directly, and to contemporaries who act indirectly. It is also concerned with scientific investigation of the socio-historical cultural world.

In 1938 when Hitler invaded Austria, Schutz and his family left for Paris and then immigrated to New York City, where his company had moved its headquarters. With other emigres and American followers of Husserl's theories, Schutz founded the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, in 1940. For nearly the next twenty years, Schutz was a banker by day and phenomenologist by night. He blended his insights of American social science and philosophy into his theories nurtured in Vienna. He also was a part-time lecturer, then professor at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, the New School for Social Research in New York City. In addition to his teachings in the social sciences, he studied, taught, and wrote about music, race relations, technology, reality and relevance, and literature. Alfred Schutz died in New York City on May 20, 1959.

Although he made numerous contributions to scientific journals, Schutz is best known for his four posthumous (1962, 1964, 1966, 1996) volumes of Collected Papers. The English translation of his Sinnhafte Aufbau, The Phenomenology of the Social World, appeared in 1967. A final statement of his theories appeared in two volumes The Structures of the Life-World (1973, 1983), completed after his death by Thomas Luckmann. Copies of Schutz's papers are found in the Center for Advanced Research in phenomenology, Florida, Atlantic University, in Boca Raton.