Schutz, Alfred (1899-1959)
Dictionary Home
AnthroBase Home
Bookmark, cite or print this page

Austrian-American sociologist and social philosopher, influenced by Max Weber's sociology and Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, and famous (i.a.) for his conception of the social as the lived everyday experience of individuals. Schutz spent the Second World War in New York along with Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roman Jakobson and others) and later remained there, becoming professor at the New School of Social Research in 1952. In the United States, Schutz was influenced by American pragmatism and logical empiricism, which mingled with the heritage from Husserl and Weber, and with a deep interest in the arts that was also stimulated in the United States, to produce a characteristic "flavor" of sociology that has deeply influenced American social science, e.g. through Talcott Parsons (who collaborated with Schutz), Peter Berger and Clifford Geertz.


An extensive article on Schutz is to be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schutz/