Alfred Schütz, Parsons’ Theory of Social Action: A Critical Review

Alfred Schütz’s posthumously published critical review, presented here in its complete English publication of 1978 and extracted from an edited correspondence volume, examines the methodological foundations of Talcott Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action. Editorial headings and marked additions accompany the argument. Schütz praises Parsons’s interpretations of Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber, but concentrates on Parsons’s own theory. His central objection is that Parsons declares the actor’s subjective standpoint indispensable while repeatedly substituting the observer’s explanatory categories for the actor’s lived meanings. The review develops from a sympathetic reconstruction into seven critical inquiries, culminating in Schütz’s account of how objective scientific models can preserve subjective meaning.

The opening reconstruction establishes substantial agreement. Scientific facts require selection and interpretation within a theoretical framework; social science cannot merely accumulate observations. Parsons identifies action as its general frame of reference and analyzes the unit act through actor, end, situation, and normative orientation. His voluntaristic theory challenges both utilitarianism’s unexplained randomness of ends and positivism’s reduction of agency to environmental or hereditary conditions. Through different routes, the four European thinkers introduce integrated values and normative elements that cannot be exhausted by scientifically valid knowledge.

Schütz nevertheless questions Parsons’s definition of facts as statements about phenomena. It threatens to conflate phenomena, their interpretation, and propositions expressing that interpretation. This anticipates the review’s governing distinction: social reality is already interpreted by those who inhabit it, before scientists construct explanations of it. An account of action must therefore distinguish these interpretive orders.

Further consideration will show that the lack of precision in the use of this term is in general the point in Professor Parsons’ theory most open to criticism.

Here “this term” is the subjective point of view. Schütz argues that Parsons’s distinction between concrete and analytical levels bundles together different issues: the problem-defined boundaries of inquiry, the logical distinction between independent parts and dependent factors, and the distinction between actor and observer. Parts and factors can be analyzed at different levels of abstraction; even the supposedly concrete unit act employs general concepts. More consequentially, acknowledging processes within an actor’s mind does not establish that an explanation uses the actor’s own categories.

The critique of rationality makes this problem tangible. Ordinary action rarely proceeds through scientifically precise concepts or independently verified causal knowledge. Actors rely on recipes, habits, partial experience, and expectations adequate to their practical purposes.

The everyday actor has, in principle, only a partial knowledge of the world of his daily life, which he only partially understands.

Such knowledge is not simply ignorance or defective science. Its relevance derives from the situation and the actor’s chances of success. Scientific verifiability belongs primarily to the observer’s evaluative standpoint. Schütz similarly questions whether normative values name autonomous purposes, heteronomous commands, or the organization of motives generally. If norms constrain action through anticipated sanctions, actors can treat them as conditions or considerations within their projects. If normativity encompasses every meaningful choice, its distinction from motivation becomes uncertain.

Schütz’s constructive alternative is a temporally differentiated theory of motives. Action, unlike mere behavior, follows a project: the actor imagines the intended act as already accomplished, in the future perfect.

Thus the project is the primary and fundamental meaning of action.

“In-order-to” motives concern the future state sought through action; “because” motives concern the past experiences through which the project arose. The latter require retrospective reflection rather than being continuously present during performance. Both belong to organized systems of plans, maxims, habits, and personality. These systems explain why ends are not random without requiring an ultimate-value hierarchy. They also change with inner time, shifting attention, and new experience.

This temporal account changes the status of the unit act.

Taking all this into account, we may state that, for the actor, nothing other than the span of his project constitutes the unit of his act.

An observer selects segments of activity according to a research problem, whereas the actor’s project establishes its subjective unity. A sentence being written may belong to a book, and the book to a broader intellectual undertaking. End, means, conditions, and actor consequently change meaning when transferred between perspectives. Schütz’s objection is not to abstraction itself, but to an unnoticed passage from one standpoint to another.

The final sections explain why subjective meaning matters without demanding impossible access to another person’s entire consciousness. Objective studies of institutions, groups, or economic relations can be legitimate within carefully delimited problems. Their abstractions must nevertheless permit a return to the activities that constitute social reality. Everyday understanding already works through typical motives rather than exhaustive knowledge of individual lives. Social interaction links these motives reciprocally: an anticipated answer is the questioner’s in-order-to motive, while understanding the question becomes a because motive for the respondent.

Scientific explanation formalizes this typification. The observer constructs ideal actors with only the motives, knowledge, and situational elements relevant to the problem. These model actors make subjective orientations available for objective examination. Their construction is constrained by relevance, adequacy to intelligible everyday action, logical consistency, and compatibility with scientific knowledge. The review thus ends with a solution to its central difficulty: scientific objectivity requires neither abandoning subjective meaning nor reproducing lived consciousness completely. Its methodological relevance lies in showing how disciplined idealization can connect explanation to the mutually interpreted social world from which its evidence arises.