Die soziale Welt und die Theorie der sozialen Handlung

Alfred Schütz’s “Die soziale Welt und die Theorie der sozialen Handlung” is a methodological essay on why social theory cannot abandon the subjective point of view. Its issue is not whether social science should be objective, but what kind of objectivity is possible when the object is meaningful action in a shared world. Schütz begins from the apparent difficulty of his thesis:

Auf den ersten Blick ist es nicht leicht zu verstehen, warum der subjektive Gesichtspunkt in den Sozialwissenschaften vorgezogen werden soll.

English translation: At first glance it is not easy to understand why the subjective point of view should be preferred in the social sciences.

The essay’s target is objectivism, especially behaviorism, when it treats social facts as if they could be described wholly from outside. Schütz does not deny the usefulness of objective schemes such as institution, group, market, or relation. He argues instead that these schemes become misleading when they detach social formations from the acting persons whose interpretations, projects, and mutual expectations sustain them. The social world is not merely a field of observable movements; it is a world already organized by participants as meaningful.

Da die soziale Welt unter jedem beliebigen Aspekt stets ein komplizierter Kosmos von menschlichen Tätigkeiten bleibt, können wir stets zum „vergessenen Menschen“ der Sozialwissenschaften zurückkehren, zum Handelnden in der sozialen Welt, dessen Tun und Fühlen dem ganzen System zugrunde liegt.

English translation: Since the social world under any aspect always remains a complex cosmos of human activities, we can always return to the "forgotten man" of the social sciences, the actor within the social world, whose doing and feeling underlies the whole system.

Schütz therefore distinguishes between reference schemes. Objective concepts may legitimately abstract from actors’ self-understandings, while subjective concepts such as person, project, action, and motive refer to the lived orientation of conduct. The error lies in shifting between these levels without recognizing that each produces different meanings. Methodological purity, for Schütz, means keeping such schemes analytically distinct while also requiring that objective constructs remain translatable back into the subjective context of action.

The center of the essay is a theory of social action. Action differs from mere behavior because it is oriented by a projected act: the actor imagines a completed outcome and acts toward it. This makes motive analysis indispensable. Schütz distinguishes Um-zu-Motive, which point toward the future end to be achieved, from Weil-Motive, which point backward to the actor’s biographical situation and prior experiences. Understanding another’s action does not mean entering the other’s consciousness completely; it means grasping the relevant typified motives, means, ends, and situation.

Vor allem kann ich das Handeln anderer Leute nicht verstehen, ohne daß ich die Um-zu- und die Weil-Motive dieses Handelns kenne.

English translation: Above all, I cannot understand the action of other people without knowing the in-order-to and the because-motives of that action.

Social action adds reciprocity. In interaction, each actor’s project takes the other’s possible response into account. Schütz’s model of asking a question shows this structure: the expected answer is the in-order-to motive of the question, while the question itself may become the because-motive of the answer. Social relations are thus chains of mutually oriented meaning, not simply causal sequences of stimuli and responses.

Der Prototyp jeder sozialen Beziehung ist eine intersubjektive Motivkette.

English translation: The prototype of every social relationship is an intersubjective chain of motives.

The final methodological question is how such subjective meaning can be studied scientifically without becoming private introspection. Schütz answers through ideal-typical construction. The social scientist withdraws from practical involvement and builds model actors supplied only with the knowledge, motives, plans, and circumstances relevant to the problem. These constructs remain scientific only if they are logically consistent, relevant, compatible with established knowledge, and adequate to how action could be intelligible in the everyday life-world.

So konstruiert er einen personalen Idealtypus, das Modell eines Handelnden, das er sich mit Bewußtsein begabt vorstellt.

English translation: Thus he constructs a personal ideal type, the model of an actor whom he imagines to be endowed with consciousness.

The essay’s lasting force lies in this double demand: social science must construct objective concepts, but those concepts must remain answerable to the meaningful practices through which actors constitute the common social world.