Das Problem der Rationalität in der sozialen Welt

Alfred Schütz: Das Problem der Rationalität in der sozialen Welt (1943)

This is a single methodological essay: Schütz critiques the loose use of “rationality” in social theory, beginning from Parsons’s definition of rational action as the scientifically intelligible choice of adequate means to possible ends. His thesis is not that actors are irrational, but that rational action has its proper home on the theoretical plane of social science, not in ordinary orientation. The essay therefore separates planes of experience—native, stranger, cartographer; actor, observer, theorist—and warns that concepts cannot be transferred unchanged across them.

Um das Ergebnis vorwegzunehmen, können wir schon sagen, daß mit dem Übergang von einer Ebene zur anderen alle begrifflichen Schemen und alle Interpretationsausdrücke modifiziert werden müssen.

English translation: To anticipate the result, we may already say that with the transition from one level to another all conceptual schemes and all interpretive expressions must be modified.

The city analogy supplies the essay’s structure. The inhabitant, foreigner, and mapmaker confront the same city, but organize it by different interests and relevances. Schütz generalizes this into a theory of levels: a level is defined by what it leaves unquestioned. Drawing on William James’s account of meaning-horizons, he argues that concepts acquire different fringes of sense when the problem changes. “Rationality” is thus a key concept because it does not merely describe the field; it divides it into distinct planes of interpretation.

Sections III and IV turn to the lifeworld. The ordinary actor is situated at the center of a practical social cosmos ordered by intimacy and anonymity, familiarity and strangeness, person and type. He does not usually interpret either nature or society scientifically; he relies on inherited habits, rules of thumb, recipes, and typifications that work well enough. Schütz’s famous image names this practical stock of knowledge:

Ich möchte dieses Wissen und seine Organisation „Kochbuch-Wissen“ nennen.

English translation: I should like to call this knowledge and its organization "cookbook knowledge."

This “cookbook” knowledge is approximate, uneven, and pragmatic. It is not held together by laws but by typical expectations: buses arrive, telephones work, letters are delivered, people perform recognizable functions. Everyday typification is therefore not yet scientific rationalization, but it is the precondition that makes later ideal-typical construction intelligible.

Sections V and VI unpack the equivocations hidden in “rational.” It may mean reasonable, deliberate, planned, predictable, logical, or chosen after comparison. Against the assumption that all action presupposes explicit choice, Schütz follows Dewey: deliberation arises when routine is interrupted and alternatives must be imaginatively rehearsed as if already completed. Genuine rational choice would require knowledge of aims, means, consequences, compatibility with other plans, accessibility of means, and—where action is social—the expected interpretations and reactions of others. This burden shows why rationality is not the native form of everyday conduct:

Ich will hier lediglich betonen, daß das Ideal der Rationalität kein Grundzug des Alltagsdenkens ist und dies auch nicht sein kann, ebensowenig wie es ein methodologisches Prinzip der Auslegung menschlichen Handelns im Alltagsleben sein kann.

English translation: I merely wish to stress here that the ideal of rationality is not, and cannot be, a distinctive feature of everyday thinking, any more than it can be a methodological principle for the interpretation of human action in everyday life.

The final section relocates rationality in social-scientific construction. The observer brackets practical involvement and replaces living actors with “puppets,” Weberian ideal types endowed only with the motives, knowledge, and means relevant to the scientific problem. The problem itself is the center of the constructed world; it determines relevance, limits admissible statements, and gives each ideal type its “index.” Yet these constructions must remain tied to the lifeworld through the postulates of subjective interpretation and adequacy. Social phenomena cannot be treated like natural events, because they must be rendered understandable as human action:

Demgegenüber wollen wir soziale Phänomene verstehen, und wir können sie nur verstehen, wenn wir sie unter das Schema der menschlichen Motive, der menschlichen Mittel und Zwecke, des menschlichen Planens – kurz – unter die Kategorien der menschlichen Handlung bringen.

English translation: By contrast, we wish to understand social phenomena, and we can understand them only if we bring them under the scheme of human motives, of human means and ends, of human planning—in short, under the categories of human action.

The “postulate of rationality” is therefore a rule for building theoretical models: construct the ideal actor as if he possessed clear scientific knowledge of the relevant elements and consistently selected appropriate means to appropriate ends. This is not an anthropology of real actors but a methodological device of “pure theory.” Schütz’s essay is decisive for phenomenological sociology because it preserves Weberian ideal types while grounding them in the actor’s lifeworld and its structures of relevance, typification, and practical knowledge. Its closing point is equally methodological: reflection clarifies scientific practice but does not command it from above.

Die Methodologie ist nicht der Lehrmeister oder der Tutor des Wissenschaftlers.

English translation: Methodology is not the teacher or the tutor of the scientist.