ABSTRACT
Pierre Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, and Jürgen Habermas criticize Schütz’s phenomenology of social relations as subjectivistic, idealistic, individualistic, and uncritical of realistic political relationships in which groups exercise power over each other. However, Schütz’s concept, neglected by critics, of ‘imposed relevances’ that impact groups from without and that they must come to terms with challenges the claim that he neglects power. A better understanding of phenomenology’s approach to intentionality offsets the charges of subjectivism and idealism, and, by the careful, factual description of the subjective meanings of oppressed peoples, phenomenological social science plays a critical role in research and society. Schütz extends his view of social relationships by conceiving political institutions as ideal unities of meaning, consisting of contemporaries understood as pertaining to highly complex networks of interdependent personal ideal types, bound by rules, and arriving at decisions mediated by consociates and experienced as everyday imposed relevances. Schütz’s positive vision of political life might conceive it as a space in which communicating actors strive to become aware of the each other’s subjective meaning, especially of those whose viewpoints have been suppressed.
