Alfred Schütz, “Tomoo Otakas Grundlegung der Lehre vom sozialen Verband” (1937)

Alfred Schütz’s review essay examines Tomoo Otaka’s philosophical grounding of the social association (sozialer Verband). Following the reviewed book’s six chapters, it reconstructs Otaka’s account of associations as ideal yet historically actual formations and tests its foundations in Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law and Husserl’s phenomenology. Schütz treats the book’s central question as indispensable: how can an association remain an identifiable whole through changes in its members and activities? His opening establishes the methodological stakes:

Es ist für die Sozialwissenschaften geradezu unerläßlich, sich immer wieder über den logischen Charakter ihrer Methoden Rechenschaft zu geben und nach ausreichender philosophischer Fundierung ihrer Grundbegriffe zu streben.

English translation: It is virtually indispensable for the social sciences repeatedly to account for the logical character of their methods and to strive for an adequate philosophical grounding of their fundamental concepts.

Otaka credits Kelsen with locating the state in the sphere of ideal formations rather than natural objects, but rejects the identification of state and legal order. Against theories that merely affirm an association’s organic or spiritual wholeness, he asks how that whole acquires actuality in the historical-social world. Ideal being and actuality are compatible: social processes provide the ground on which an association becomes actual without themselves being identical with it. The state’s persistence despite changing personnel, or temporary inactivity, supplies a principal argument for its ideal character.

Schütz’s first major objection concerns Otaka’s treatment of Weber. Otaka argues that interpretive sociology dissolves associations into individual actions while tacitly relying on objectively intelligible formations such as the state. Schütz replies that Weber’s method deliberately investigates how actors orient themselves toward such objective meanings. Its restriction to subjective interpretation is a methodological starting point, not an inadvertent elimination of its object:

Die Leistung der idealtypischen Methode besteht ja gerade darin, durch Aufzeigung des subjektiv gemeinten Sinnes des oder der Handelnden einen Zugang zu jenen Sinnzusammenhängen zu finden, an denen sich die Handelnden als dem allen zugänglichen Sinn, als „Sinn für jedermann“, kurz als dem objektiven Sinn orientieren.

English translation: The achievement of the ideal-typical method consists precisely in finding, by showing the subjectively intended meaning of the actor or actors, an approach to those contexts of meaning toward which actors orient themselves as meaning accessible to everyone, as “meaning for everyone,” in short, as objective meaning.

For Schütz, sociology must investigate both the entry of objective meanings into subjective contexts and the constitution of associations through those contexts. This objection anticipates his criticism of Otaka’s selective use of Husserl. Schütz broadly accepts the distinction between ideal being and normative obligation: meaningful tools and actions are neither mere natural events nor necessarily norms. Yet showing that an association is ideal does not establish that it is actual rather than fictitious.

Otaka therefore turns to phenomenological evidence, intentional fulfillment, and categorical intuition. Ideal objects become accessible through acts founded on perception, although they are not themselves sensibly perceived. Schütz credits several analyses but corrects Otaka’s attribution of truth to the act of judgment rather than its content. More fundamentally, he argues that Otaka neglects Husserl’s constitutive investigations—the analysis of how objects become identifiable objects of actual and possible consciousness. The ideal identity exhibited even by ordinary things does not, without further argument, establish the distinctive being of historical associations.

The middle discussion reconstructs Otaka’s hierarchy of meaningful formations and his distinction between two directions of foundation. Actual things and actions ground the actuality of higher ideal formations; ideal meanings, conversely, make those things and actions intelligible. This distinction is intended to remove an apparent circle. Schütz nevertheless questions Otaka’s separation of material formations, such as tools and artworks, from social formations: both ultimately depend on antecedent social action.

The problem becomes sharper when Otaka identifies communal association as the adequate ground of a social association’s actuality. Members supposedly stand in harmonious relations through awareness of their common membership. Schütz questions both the classification of relationships and the inherited opposition between communal and purposive association. Explaining membership through consciousness of an already given association risks assuming what requires explanation. Otaka distinguishes objective meaning-formation from actualization, but his account of deliberately founded or historically inherited associations leaves Schütz dissatisfied.

The fourth chapter develops associations as wholes irreducible to members or their actions. Otaka makes authority an essential feature and distinguishes community, society, and corporate association according to the relation between whole and individual. The fifth places these formations within structural connections among law, religion, economy, and other meaningful domains. Law serves as the principal example: norms regulating individuals differ from coercive rules governing the whole or its organs. Accordingly:

„Staat und Recht sind nicht identisch, sondern stehen miteinander in engstem untrennbarem Strukturzusammenhang“ (236).

English translation: “State and law are not identical, but stand in the closest, inseparable structural connection with one another” (236).

Both remain ideal objects, so their distinction need not reproduce a separation between a natural state and normative law. Otaka also applies this account to international law, whose contractual order lacks a fully developed coercive apparatus. The final chapter locates his theory within sociology as an ontological inquiry into actual associations, alongside the study of social relationships and distinct from historical investigation of development.

Schütz’s concluding judgment separates the importance of the problem from the adequacy of its solution:

Man kann daher vielleicht manche These Otakas ablehnen, nicht aber seiner Problemstellung die Anerkennung versagen, daß sie echt, neuartig und überaus bedeutsam ist.

English translation: One may therefore perhaps reject some of Otaka’s theses, but one cannot deny his formulation of the problem the recognition that it is genuine, novel, and exceedingly significant.

The essay’s relevance lies in this qualified endorsement. Otaka renews the philosophical inquiry into collective identity and historical actuality; Schütz insists that its resolution requires a more rigorous account of subjective meaning, social action, and constitution.