ABSTRACT
While synthesizing hermeneutics and pragmatism was challenging, the American theorists were able to marry subjective understanding of phenomena with human action and pragmatic social change. Wilhelm Dilthey was profoundly influenced by the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, an early nineteenth-century German theologian and Romantic philosopher who discovered the broader meaning of hermeneutics. For Schleiermarcher, hermeneutics became an attempt by a member of one culture to "grasp the experience" of members of another. Dilthey also influenced Martin Heidegger's notion of hermeneutics and contributed to the early rise of existentialism and eventually poststructuralism. Phenomenology and hermeneutics have become central, however, to the construction and study of contemporary social theory. Phenomenology was hardly on the American sociological radar when Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmarm published their seminal The Social Construction of Reality in 1966. A truly Americanized translation of phenomenology was developed by Harold Garfinkel and popularized in the late 1960s.
