4,366 works (including 487 books, 3,476 articles and 400 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
A brief private note, written two days before Christmas 1937, catches Alfred Schütz in an ordinary moment between his phenomenological labors. Just back from Paris, he has carried home an issue of the Revue de Paris for its essay by Paul Valéry, which he presses on his correspondent with the request that it be returned once read. He adds a book as a Christmas gift, should the friend not already own it, and sends warm wishes to him and his wife. Slight in itself, the letter survives as a small biographical trace of the émigré scholar's Parisian ties and reading life on the eve of war—a fragment of correspondence rather than a work of theory.
Who decides which differences between people should count? In this essay, republished in 1964, Alfred Schütz approaches equality through the classifications that organize everyday social life. His central distinction is between belonging to a group as its members understand it and being assigned to a category by outsiders. Racial legislation, segregation, and minority protection show how imposed classifications can make one characteristic govern a person’s entire social standing. Schütz also exposes a tension within equal opportunity: formal eligibility does not ensure that an opportunity is accessible or compatible with someone’s other commitments. The essay offers a precise way to examine why equal treatment can leave domination intact—and why preserving a group’s distinctive life may require more than removing discriminatory barriers.
Typifying consists in passing by what makes the individual unique and irreplaceable.
Can a theory explain social action while replacing the actor’s meanings with the observer’s categories? This is Alfred Schütz’s central challenge to Talcott Parsons in this critical review, presented in its complete 1978 English publication. Appreciative of Parsons’s achievement, Schütz questions whether his account of rationality captures people who act through habits, practical recipes, and partial knowledge rather than scientific verification. His alternative turns on the project: what someone intends to accomplish gives an action its unity, which may differ sharply from the segment an observer chooses to study. Readers can discover how Schütz distinguishes future-directed purposes from motives rooted in past experience—and how scientific models might preserve these subjective meanings without claiming exhaustive access to another person’s consciousness.