Schütz’s essay is a phenomenological analysis of equality as it functions in everyday social thinking. Rather than treating equality as a theological, metaphysical, or natural-law principle, he asks how concrete groups actually sort persons, actions, roles, and claims within historically inherited worlds of meaning.
Die Alltags-Aspekte der Gleichheit – im Unterschied zur philosophischen und theologischen Idee der Gleichheit – haben daher einen relationalen Charakter; sie sind von der Struktur des Relevanzsystems abhängig, und wir setzen voraus, daß ein Umschwung in dieser Struktur sich auch im Wandel der Gleichheits-Aspekte widerspiegelt.
English translation: The everyday aspects of equality—as distinguished from the philosophical and theological idea of equality—therefore have a relational character; they depend on the structure of the system of relevances, and we assume that a shift in this structure is also reflected in a change in the aspects of equality.
The social world is given to actors as a taken-for-granted order of institutions, customs, signs, roles, and status distinctions. Everyday knowledge is therefore not social science but practical orientation: a stock of typifications by which people recognize parents, strangers, citizens, officials, races, professions, motives, and situations. Typification enables action, but it does so by selecting what matters and ignoring what does not.
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.
For Schütz, equality is inseparable from relevance. No object, person, or group is simply equal or unequal “in itself”; comparison presupposes a problem, an interest, and a domain within which selected traits count. A person may be equal as a citizen, unequal in wealth, irrelevant as a musician, and incomparable as a friend. Equality is therefore not homogeneity, and confusion arises whenever different relevance-domains are treated as though they formed one common scale.
Wir schlagen vor, die Ausdrücke Gleichheit und Ungleichheit für die Beziehung der Elemente zu reservieren, die zu demselben Relevanzbereich gehören.
English translation: We propose to reserve the terms equality and inequality for the relation of elements belonging to the same domain of relevance.
This framework guides Schütz’s reading of classical discussions of justice. Plato’s distinction between arithmetical and geometrical equality, and Aristotle’s examples of offices, merit, and flute-playing, show that any judgment of equal or unequal treatment depends on the criterion by which worth, desert, or qualification is defined. Since such criteria vary across regimes and cultures, equality becomes a problem for the sociology of knowledge: it reflects a group’s “relatively natural worldview” and its hierarchy of relevances.
Schütz then distinguishes between the meanings a group has for its own members and the meanings assigned to it by outsiders. The in-group experiences its order as obvious and often legitimates it through a central myth. The out-group interprets it through foreign categories and may stereotype it. The social scientist constructs second-order types from these first-order everyday typifications. Thus equality must always be analyzed through the tension between subjective and objective interpretation.
Der subjektive Sinn, den die Gruppe für ihre Mitglieder hat, besteht in ihrem Wissen von einer gemeinsamen Situation und damit von einem gemeinsamen System von Typisierungen und Relevanzen.
English translation: The subjective meaning that the group has for its members consists in their knowledge of a common situation and thus of a common system of typifications and relevances.
This distinction becomes decisive in Schütz’s treatment of discrimination, minority rights, and opportunity. Outsiders may impose a category on persons who do not define themselves primarily by it; domination begins when one trait—race, origin, religion, citizenship—is made to stand for the whole person and to reorder that person’s social possibilities. Conversely, minority claims may seek either assimilation and formal non-discrimination or recognition of difference and special protection. “Equality” can therefore mean equal treatment, equal access, preservation of a group’s own way of life, or compensation within an unequal social field.
The concluding discussion of equality of opportunity sharpens the same point. Objectively, opportunities are tied to socially defined roles and qualifications: careers are said to be open to talents. Subjectively, however, a chance exists only if the individual knows about it, can reach it, can integrate it into a personal relevance-system, and can reconcile it with other memberships and self-understandings. Schütz’s central achievement is to show that equality is never merely formal or abstract. It becomes socially real only through typifications, relevance structures, institutions, and struggles over who has the authority to define the terms of comparison.
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