Alfred Schütz, T.S. Eliot’s Theory of Culture

Alfred Schütz’s lecture, delivered in 1950 and published posthumously in 2011, examines the conceptual foundations of Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Its subject is the legitimacy of Eliot’s claim to speak sociologically, rather than the achievement of his poetry. Schütz concentrates on three connected problems: the individual, group, and societal senses of culture; the relationship between culture and religion; and the distinction between class and elite. His central objection is that Eliot repeatedly shifts between participants’ experience and observers’ interpretation without clarifying either the standpoint adopted or the changing meanings of his terms. The critique also develops Schütz’s own account of culture as a historically transmitted world of unquestioned assumptions.

Eliot distinguishes individual cultivation from the culture of a group or class and that of society as a whole. Individual culture depends upon group culture, which in turn depends upon the wider society. Since manners, learning, philosophy, and artistic sensibility seldom coincide fully in one person, culture must be sought in their social interrelations. Schütz recognizes the significance of this move but questions its conceptual execution. “Group,” “class,” and “society” remain insufficiently specified, while the national boundaries of shared culture obscure occupational affinities across countries. Eliot’s concern that specialization can produce cultural fragmentation is intelligible; his account does not adequately establish which forms of belonging organize cultural experience.

The difficulty becomes decisive when Eliot introduces an evaluative definition:

Culture may even be described simply as that which makes life worth living.

For Schütz, this formulation immediately demands an account of whose life and whose judgment are involved. An insider may find a way of life valuable according to inherited standards; an outsider may judge it through another culture’s values or through a reconstruction of the insider’s standards. These are different interpretive operations. Drawing on Ruth Benedict’s comparison of Zuni and Kwakiutl cultures, Schütz observes that conduct esteemed in one setting may appear intolerable in another. Eliot’s definition conceals precisely the problem that sociological interpretation must address: the relationship between actors’ meanings and observers’ explanations.

The longest section pursues this difficulty through Eliot’s treatment of religion. Eliot proposes that culture is the incarnation of a people’s religion, yet also acknowledges conflicts between religious faith and cultural behavior. He attempts to reconcile these claims by locating unity at an unconscious level and opposition within conscious experience. Schütz argues that this solution changes the meanings of the terms rather than establishing their relationship. Extending belief to everything endorsed through conduct also risks confusing ordinary acceptance with religious faith.

Against religion’s privileged explanatory position, Schütz proposes a plural account of cultural formation:

It depends upon the problem at hand which of the many relationships has to be considered as relevant for a specific purpose by the social scientist. None of them, however, has a monopoly.

Religion interacts with government, economic conditions, technology, language, science, and other powers. Its historical effectiveness also depends upon particular social circumstances. The appropriate explanatory relationship therefore follows from the question being investigated, not from a prior identification of culture with religion. Schütz’s criticism is methodological without denying religion’s importance: he rejects the conversion of a suggestive religious interpretation into an insufficiently grounded sociological principle.

His constructive alternative emerges by reconsidering what Eliot calls unconscious participation:

If we analyze these concepts more closely, then it turns out that culture is just everything which is taken for granted by a given social group at a certain period of its historical existence.

Culture includes institutions, tools, habitual practices, ideas, and the systems of relevance through which a group regards its life as right and reasonable. Its ordinary acceptance is not necessarily unconscious. Rather, the historical motives supporting inherited convictions may have disappeared from memory while the convictions remain unquestioned. This distinction makes cultural change explicable: unfamiliar problems, curiosity, comparison with other groups, or disruptive events can render inherited assumptions questionable. Crisis occurs when the underlying organization of relevances itself becomes unstable.

This reconstruction allows Schütz to preserve part of Eliot’s insight. Religion and everyday custom may belong to one unquestioned world for a participant, without becoming identical concepts for the sociologist. Reflective religious commitment can then unsettle that world, producing conflict between faith and customary behavior. Schütz also accepts Eliot’s observation that modern societies retain heterogeneous beliefs, finding contemporary mythology in mass-media celebrities, political villains, heroic investigators, and atomic apocalypse.

The final section turns to cultural transmission. Schütz follows Eliot’s objections to Mannheim’s specialized elites and his insistence that professional achievement alone cannot preserve an encompassing way of life. Eliot assigns families, classes, and an integrating elite the task of maintaining continuity across generations. Yet Schütz observes that status arrangements are themselves elements of what a culture takes for granted. Their inherited authority cannot establish their sociological necessity.

Since his theory of class and elite—which a reviewer has rightly called "the most reasonable defense of social inequality that I remember reading"—is certainly not the outcome of a sociological analysis, but a political program, the social scientist need not make any comment.

The concluding appeal to East Coker places Eliot’s defense of hierarchy beside his poetic vision of shared mortality. The lecture’s enduring contribution lies in its distinction between lived cultural certainty, normative commitments, and scientific explanation. Schütz turns Eliot’s conceptual ambiguities into a positive account of culture as a shared but revisable horizon of assumptions, whose interpretation requires explicit attention to standpoint and relevance.