Following his graduation from high school, he was drafted into the Austrian Army where he quickly rose to the American equivalent rank of second lieutenant.
His army regiment was dispatched to fight in a series of heavy battles on the Italian front (WWI).
[5] As noted by Helmut Wagner (1983), Schutz's fascination with this problem was a result of his experience in combat, combined with returning to starving and economically decimated Vienna.
He was once described by Edmund Husserl as “a banker by day and a philosopher by night.”[2] In 1933, the threat of Adolf Hitler's rise in Germany caused Schutz and other Viennese intellectuals to flee Austria and seek asylum in allied countries.
Schutz received a substantial amount of assistance from his wife, Ilse, who transcribed his working notes and letters from his taped dictations.
[8] Four volumes of Collected Papers were published posthumously, along with the draft of a second book he had been working on prior to his death.
[9] Schutz was strongly influenced by Ludwig von Mises,[10] Henri Bergson, William James, and Edmund Husserl, as well as Max Weber.
Drawing on phenomenology, Schutz's principal aim was to create a philosophical foundation for the social sciences.
Schutz retains Weber's conception of social science as properly committed to the principle of value neutrality, but also to value relevance, and that its investigations must rely on “ideal types”.
He viewed the technique of bracketing, drawn from Husserlian phenomenology, as a way beyond the limitations of ideal-type analysis.
Even so, when Husserl asked Schutz to be his assistant, he was unable to accept the offer at Freiburg University for personal reasons.
"[13] Schutz is also known for his belief that humans attempt to typify everything; i.e., to categorize people and things to better understand them within the context of society.
Schutz's theories and conceptions are illuminated through an intense and insightful correspondence with Harvard scholar Talcott Parsons.
[15] Further insights into the fundamental differences between Schutz and Parsons is provided by a critical examination of original correspondence that brought in a third scholarly voice—that of Eric Voegelin.
As noted by Farganis (2011), Peter L. Berger, also a student of Schutz's, was arguably the best-known living sociologist influenced by Schutz, especially through his creation of the social construction theory, which explains how the processes of externalization, objectification, and internalization contribute to the social construction of reality.
[17] Berger and Luckmann went on to use Schutz's work to further understand human culture and reality, through the development of a new form of the sociology of knowledge.
First, it rejects the concept of objective research: phenomenologists would rather group presumptions through a process called phenomenological epoche.
Second, phenomenology believes that analyzing the daily human behavior will provide one with a comprehensive understanding of nature.
Sociologically speaking, this is in part because persons can be better understood by the unique ways they reflect and symbolize the society they live in.
Finally, phenomenology is considered to be oriented on discovery, and therefore phenomenologists gather research using methods that are far less restricting than in other sciences.
[20] Social phenomenology is concerned with how people use ordinary, everyday interactions to produce a feeling of reality and intersubjectivity.
Schutz's division of Husserl's lebenswelt (the mundane 'lifeworld') into four distinct sub-worlds is perhaps his most influential theoretical contribution.
The theory of the lifeworld is that social experience creates a world that is separated between:[1]: xxvii The former consists of the umwelt ('environment'), the environment defined through the perception and action of agents.
[25]: 177 He also wanted to map the progressive anonymisation of the contemporaries (mitwelt), which was a measurement of increasing anonymity of "my absent friend, his brother whom he has described to me, the professor whose books I have read, the postal clerk, the Canadian Parliament, abstract entities like Canada herself, the rules of English grammar, or the basic principles of jurisprudence.
In his later writings, Schutz explored how everyday social experiences that pertain to these dimensions are most often intertwined in varying degrees of anonymity.
[26] For instance:[27][I]f in a face-to-face relationship with a friend I discuss a magazine article dealing with the attitude of the President and Congress toward China, I am in a relationship not only with the perhaps anonymous contemporary writer of the article but also with the contemporary individual or collective actors on the social scene designated by the terms, 'President', 'Congress', 'China'1932: Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie.
1972: Gesammelte Aufsätze: Band I. Das Problem der Sozialen Wirklichkeit Translated by B. Luckmann and R.H. Grathoff.
1973: The Structures of the Life-World [Strukturen der Lebenswelt], with Thomas Luckmann, translated by R. M. Zaner and H. T. Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
1977: Zur Theorie sozialen Handelns: Briefwechsel Alfred Schutz, Talcott Parsons, edited by W. M. Sprondel.