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Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy pp 415–435Cite as

Alfred Schutz: Reciprocity, Alterity, and Participative Citizenry

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Part of the book series: Contributions to Phenomenology ((CTPH,volume 47))

Abstract

Alfred Schutz was born in Vienna in 1899 to Alfred and Johanna Schutz, and when Schutz’s father died before his birth, Johanna married Otto Schutz, his father’s brother. Schutz maintained very close relationships with both his parents throughout his life. He attended the Esterhazy Gymnasium in Vienna, and with the outbreak of World War I, served with the Austrian artillery divisions. Upon returning to a dispirited Vienna, he studied law and the social sciences at the University of Vienna and business at the Viennese Academy of International Trade, graduating with his law degree in 1921. He did postgraduate research in international law, sociology, economics, and philosophy under Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises. In Mises’s seminar, Schutz formed lifetime friendships with Friedrich Hayek, Felix Kaufmann, Fritz Machlup, and Eric Voegelin.

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Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

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Related Works

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  6. “Report on the Discussions of Barriers to Equality of Opportunity for the Development of Powers of Social and Civil Judgment,” 301-2, 305, 306, 311; “Memorandum to Doctor Harold Laswell,” 293-94. It is tempting to speculate that Schutz took a reformist, gradualist approach to reducing social tensions, emphasizing law and education, as Lester Embree has observed, precisely because coerced social change has the tendency to deny agents participation in their own transformation. One falls into inconsistencies if one promotes participation of the excluded without at the same time striving as much as is possible to promote the participation of those who excluded them in the process of their own and society-wide transformation. See Lester Embree, “Schutz on Reducing Social Tensions,” in Phenomenology of the Political, ed. Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), 82, 101-2.

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  7. Felix Kaufmann, Logik und Rechtswissenschaft, Grundriss eines Systems der reinen Rechtlehre (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1922), 36, 46, 60-63, 68-80, 91; Die Kriterien des Recht, Eine Untersuchung über die Prinzipien der juristischen Methodenlehre (Aalen: Scientia, 1966), 111-12, 138-39, 147, 155-56, 162-64. To see the kind of phenomenological-eidetic approach, parallel to Kaufmann’s, that Schutz might have taken toward legal science and political science, and to appreciate the role of a constitution in establishing law, see Fred Kersten, “The Purely Possible Political Philosophy of Alfred Schutz,” in Schutzian Social Science, 187-211.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St. Louis University, USA

    Michael Barber

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Barber, M. (2002). Alfred Schutz: Reciprocity, Alterity, and Participative Citizenry. In: Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_21

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6082-2

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