ABSTRACT
Schutz (1899-1959) has had a considerable influence on sociology. In so far as he uses the insight that the social scientist’s constructs are drawn from those of actors in concrete situations, and thereby returns to this basis, his work has been important. Yet, of the theorists we have so far considered he is the one who least furthers those concerns drawn out as crucial to our perspective. The ambivalence between a phenomenological reduction which he inherits directly from Husserl, with its capacity for critical reversal, and a concern to chart and classify the zones of the ‘natural attitude’, is resolved in favour of the latter. His attempts to justify this approach by constructing himself an area to which phenomenological reduction becomes irrelevant are unconvincing. Having so clearly raised the issue of such a reduction process he makes it difficult for us to avoid the criticisms which it itself raises within his own work. So much does he accept the framework of the natural attitude as his basis that any suggestion that its constitution involves the mutilation of our capacities or the loss of our experience of being for ourselves as hitherto considered departs as if it had never been raised.
