ABSTRACT
Prisching explores the origins of Berger und Luckmann’s theories in the intellectual climate of interwar Vienna and the original impetuses for the interpretive paradigm (via the intermediation of Alfred Schütz). In doing so, Prisching does not restrict the intellectual history to the well-known Weber-Husserl-Bergson-Schütz-Berger-Luckmann tradition. Rather, he provides a more extensive intellectual map: a landscape of theoretical discussions, distant or related paradigms, common questions and divergent answers. He argues that Alfred Schütz’s oeuvre should be seen as an answer to the dominant questions discussed intensively in Vienna in the interwar period, which had become a bastion of logical empiricism and a stronghold in the fight against metaphysics. Schütz, who participated intensively in several circles (but not the Vienna Circle), played an important role in the development of the interpretive paradigm. By integrating Schütz’s ideas into The Social Construction of Reality, Berger and Luckmann extended the tradition and implemented a trans-Atlantic synthesis.
