The archive.

Max Weber demanded that sociology understand action through its subjective meaning, but never explained what such meaning is, how it arises in lived experience, or how anyone else could grasp it. First published in 1932, this is the book that supplies the missing foundation. Drawing on Bergson and Husserl, Schütz argues that meaning is no hidden mental substance but an act of self-interpretation: an experience becomes meaningful only when reflection lifts it, already elapsed, out of the stream of inner time. From there he rebuilds the whole edifice, the projected act with its Um-zu and Weil motives, the understanding of others through signs and typifications, and a graded social world reaching from the intimate We of consociates to the anonymous contemporaries, predecessors, and successors whose meanings we can no longer revise. Scientific sociology, he concludes, constructs ideal types that must stay answerable to the actor's own meaning.

Gemeinter Sinn eines Erlebnisses ist nichts anderes als eine Selbstauslegung des Erlebnisses von einem neuen Erleben her.

English translation: “The intended meaning of a lived experience is nothing other than a self-interpretation of that experience from the standpoint of a new experience.”

Reviewing Husserl's newly published Cartesian Meditations—still available only in French—Schütz reads it as an attempt to ground all philosophy in transcendental subjectivity, taking up Descartes's radical doubt while correcting its errors through the epoché and the phenomenological reduction. He follows Husserl's analyses of intentionality, the noetic-noematic correlation, and the transcendental ego as a monadic field structured by habitualities and passive genesis. Special weight falls on the difficult fifth meditation and its account of how the alter ego is constituted through appresentation and pairing, yielding an objective world valid for everyone. Schütz marks the work's transcendental idealism and its opposition to psychologism, points toward the tasks it opens for a phenomenologically grounded social science, and closes with the wish that Husserl make the book available to German readers.

„Gegenstände“ sind daher – in der reduzierten Sphäre sowohl als auch in der natürlichen Einstellung – nichts anderes als intentionale Korrelate ihrer Bewußtseinsweisen.

English translation: “Objects" are therefore – in the reduced sphere as well as in the natural attitude – nothing other than intentional correlates of their modes of consciousness.”

What began as a 4,000-word review for Economica, commissioned by Hayek, had swollen into a 20,000-word analysis—"a monster," Schütz calls it—of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. This 1940 letter opens the celebrated transatlantic exchange between the émigré phenomenologist and the Harvard theorist of social action. Schütz reports reading Parsons's unpublished second manuscript three times, reserves his sharpest comments for an oral meeting he proposes in New York or Cambridge, and presses gently on their differences over the foundations of a theory of action. He encloses his essay "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences" from Farber's Husserl memorial volume and mentions his forthcoming paper on William James, folding a personal letter into a document at the crossroads of phenomenology and American sociology.

Ich verdanke Ihren Theorien auch dort unendlich viel Gewinn und Anregung, wo ich von ihnen abweiche.

English translation: “I owe your theories an infinite amount of profit and stimulation, even where I depart from them.”

Social scientists study a world that its inhabitants already interpret: tools, gestures and institutions carry meanings before they become objects of research. In this essay, represented by the German manuscript version with an attached January 1939 draft, Alfred Schütz asks how scientific explanation can transform those meanings without losing its footing in everyday experience. He draws on Husserl’s phenomenology while distinguishing the social sciences’ concern with relations among people from the transcendental problem of how another self is constituted. His engagement with Max Weber makes the methodological stakes concrete: the economic actor and legal subject are useful constructions, not people encountered in life. Readers can trace why ideal types are necessary—and why, for Schütz, mistaking them for reality undermines the understanding they enable.

How does a thought retain its meaning while its content continually changes? In this essay, supplied in its 1970 republication, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s stream of thought into conversation with Husserl’s phenomenological psychology. His focus is the often-overlooked fringe of experience: the felt relations, expectations, and receding impressions that make a present thought more than an isolated mental event. Schütz shows how James’s descriptions can illuminate Husserl’s accounts of horizons and temporal continuity without making James a phenomenologist or claiming historical influence. The comparison gives readers a concrete approach to a difficult problem: how an object remains identifiable across changing experiences, and how the conclusion of a train of thought can remain available after its intermediate steps have faded.

Listening to someone speak, we follow a thought as it unfolds; reflecting on our own experience, we grasp what has already occurred. This temporal contrast anchors Alfred Schütz’s alternative to Scheler’s account of how we understand others. In this essay, republished in 1967, Schütz accepts Scheler’s challenge to theories that infer another mind from bodily signs, but rejects the hypothesis of an originally undifferentiated consciousness. A shared present, he argues, can explain the priority of the “We” without dissolving distinct persons into a common stream of experience. The resulting account separates participation in another’s unfolding activity from certainty about what that person thinks. Readers can discover why ordinary conversation offers a precise philosophical problem: how we inhabit time together while remaining irreducibly different centres of experience.

Knowing how to get across a city is not the same as knowing how to map it. In this essay, first published in 1943 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz uses the native, stranger, and cartographer to distinguish practical understanding from scientific explanation. His central question is what happens when social scientists judge everyday action by standards of knowledge and consistency developed for theory. Ordinary actors rely on workable recipes; theoretical actors possess motives and information stipulated by their creators. Schütz defends such models without confusing them with living people. Readers can discover both why routine conduct need not be irrational and why a logically coherent explanation must still answer to the meanings an action has for those involved.

Knowing a group’s customs is not the same as knowing how to act among its members. In this essay, republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines the adult newcomer whose inherited expectations no longer provide reliable guidance. The immigrant is his principal example, but his concern is the practical work of entering any unfamiliar social world. Insiders rely on shared recipes for conduct; the stranger must investigate whether those recipes will work from a position they do not necessarily anticipate. Schütz’s distinction between understanding a language and expressing oneself through its social nuances makes this difficulty concrete. His analysis also reframes apparent disloyalty: what members regard as reluctance to accept their ways may be the newcomer’s inability to take those ways for granted.

Falling asleep, becoming absorbed in a play, and adopting a scientist’s detached standpoint change not just what we attend to, but what counts as real. In this essay, Schütz recasts William James’s multiple realities as “finite provinces of meaning”: distinct ways of experiencing, rather than separate worlds. His central tension is that everyday life remains paramount even when imagination, dreams, or theory suspend its demands. Bodily action, resistant objects, and communication with others give practical reality its special weight. This perspective sharpens a difficulty for social science: how can detached theoretical models account for people whose actions are lived, purposeful, and shared? Readers can discover both what abstraction makes intelligible and what it leaves behind when it departs from the actor’s standpoint.

Social inquiry assumes that people understand one another’s actions—but what makes such understanding possible? In this essay, first published in 1945 and reprinted here in 1967, Alfred Schütz approaches Husserl’s phenomenology with that foundational concern in view. A perceived chair, a blossoming tree, and a learned theorem make technical distinctions concrete: experience includes unseen possibilities, remembered appearances, and knowledge whose original acquisition no longer needs to be repeated. Schütz explains why suspending judgments about the world’s existence is not denying the world, and why investigating essences need not invoke mystical intuition. His account gives social scientists a precise boundary as well as a resource: phenomenology does not replace empirical research, but examines the structures of consciousness and meaning that research takes for granted.

The stranger expects unfamiliarity; the homecomer expects to know where he belongs. In this essay, first published in 1945 and republished here in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines why that confidence can make return unexpectedly difficult. His central example is the veteran whose changed priorities and experience meet a household shaped by its own intervening life—and by public stereotypes of combat. Letters may sustain affection without preserving shared understanding; restoring an old job may fail to recognize newly acquired ambitions. Schütz’s distinctive contribution is to connect these practical failures of recognition with the way later experience alters the meaning of the past. Homecoming, he argues, requires preparation on both sides: renewed belonging cannot simply reproduce the life remembered.

No one in modern society, Schütz begins, can comprehend the whole of the world he depends on; we use technologies, markets, and legal orders through trust and routine rather than understanding. From this he builds a sociology of how knowledge is socially distributed, sorted through three ideal types: the expert, whose clear knowledge is narrow; the man on the street, content with recipes and feeling; and the well-informed citizen, who seeks reasonably grounded opinions on what concerns him indirectly. His engine is a theory of relevance—zones of interest shifting like contour lines, and chosen 'essential' relevances set against 'imposed' ones that arrive from anonymous powers. Since most of what we know is socially derived, he distinguishes eyewitness, insider, analyst, and commentator. The essay ends as a democratic warning: opinion polling can elevate the uninformed and press sanctioned ignorance on those who know better.

Wir besitzen immer weniger das Recht zu definieren, was für uns relevant ist und was nicht.

English translation: “We possess less and less the right to define what is relevant for us and what is not.”