The Online Library of Liberty

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• Editorial Staff
• Associate Editors
• Editorial
• Bibliographical Essay: Contemporary Currents In Libertarian Political Philosophy By David Gordon
• I: Social Science Methodology
• Social Science Paradigms
• Sociology, Theory, & the Welfare State
• Durkheim, Ideology, and Method
• Polanyi, Hierarchy & Reductionism
• Historicism: Individuality Or Pattern?
• Social Science: Game, Drama, and Text
• Alfred Schutz and Phenomenology
• Moral Honesty In Social Science
• II: Economic Analysis
• Austrian Vs. Neoclassical Economics: Equilibrium
• Frank Fetter & the Austrian School
• Subjective Vs. Objective Costs
• The Significance of Subjective Costs
• Socialist Economic Calculation
• The Welfare State: Business & Labor
• Child Labor and Capitalism
• Economics Vs. Minimum Wage Politics
• Adam Smith Vs. Neo-mercantilism
• Laissez Faire and Moral Revolution
• III: Human Rights and Ethics
• Recent Scholarship On Rights
• Two Concepts of Rights
• Establishing Human Rights
• Misunderstanding Human Rights
• Is Privacy an Absolute Right?
• Animal Rights
• Nature and the Tao
• Self-knowledge: Nietzsche, Heidegger & Buber
• The Prospects of Objective Morality
• Measuring Ethical Ideologies
• Individualism and “locus of Control”
• Should We License Parents?
• IV: The Heritage of Freedom
• How Conservatives Differ From Liberals
• English Radicalism: Rights Vs. War & Taxes.
• Liberalism: the Seedbed of American Culture
• Republican Liberty & Military Policy
• Thomas Burke: Whig Radical
• Liberal Republicans During Reconstruction
• Adam Smith & the Liberal Tradition
• Human Individuality and Autonomy

Alfred Schutz and Phenomenology

Susan Hekman

• University of Texas at Arlington

“Phenomenology, Ordinary Language, and the Methodology of the Social Sciences.” The Western Political Quarterly 33(September 1980).

In the wake of recent critiques of positivism as an inadequate philosophy, what perspective provides us with a coherent methodology for the social sciences?

Professor Hekman compares phenomenology and ordinary language analysis and judges phenomenology superior. Both phenomenology and ordinary language analysis agree in denying the positivist dichotomy between subjective and objective meaning and “insist that the starting-point of social scientific analysis must be the understanding of social action in the terms of the social actors themselves.” Both rival approaches thus take for the subject matter of the social sciences the shared “intersubjective” concepts of the individual social actors. Accordingly, both approaches satisfy the first of Professor Heck's four criteria of a coherent social science methodology: (1) it must define the “subject matter.” However ordinary language analysis fails to satisfy the remaining three criteria for a sound social science methodology: (2) it must explain how the subject matter or concepts of social living are formed and constituted intersubjectively (that is, how the “facts” of social sciences become “facts”; (3) it must provide the social scientist with precisely defined conceptual tools and procedures to discuss the social “facts” and concepts; and (4) it must define the limits of social scientific activity.

Although both phenomenologists and ordinary language philosophers begin their analysis of social life with the actors' concepts, for ordinary language analysis this starting point and general “perspective” is also the conclusion of its analyses. Phenomenology, by contrast, probes deeper into its analyses of social scientific reality and satisfies all four criteria of a detailed and coherent “methodology.” The relative merits of the two rival approaches are seen by comparing the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) as elaborated in his book, The Phenomenology of The Social World, with Peter Winch's and A.R. Louch's versions of ordinary language analysis. Schutz's analysis is shown to be superior in unraveling Max Weber's concept of socially “meaningful action” and “subjective meaning.” Unlike ordinary language philosophers, Schutz examines and analyzes the very “constituting process” by which social actors create their subjective word views, meanings, and concepts. Schutz also surpasses ordinary language analysis by exploring “the process of social scientific theorizing, examining the nature of social scientific concepts and the relationship between the social world and the world of the social scientific theorist.”

What is Schutz's solution to the difficulty of how the many subjectively constituted or “private” social word views of individual actors can become intersubjectively known and meaningful to other social actors and to the social scientist? Schutz developed Weber's notion of “ideal types” or explanations of intersubjective meaning that conform to these postulates: (1) The “ideal types” offer an explanation of the action which is understandable to the social actor; (2) the postulate of subjective interpretation specifies that the “ideal types” refer to the action as a result of “subjective meaning constitution;” and (3) the postulate of rationality requires that the “ideal types” conform to the logical rules of scientific method.

Schutz's social phenomenology offers a systematic approach to exploring the realm of social meaning and consciousness—an exploration which Wittgenstein's ordinary language analysis shuns.

Phenomenology offers a fruitful methodological tool for the social sciences concern with its subject matter of meaningful human action. It shows “that the individual's constitution of meaning takes place in an intersubjective context” and it provides the social scientist access to this “private” or “subjective” realm. By contrast, the “ordinary language philosophers' assumption that this realm is private and hence inaccessible…precludes their formulation of a comprehensive methodology for the social sciences.”