Introduction

This chapter introduces the book that explores the social theory of Alfred Schutz, a philosopher and sociologist most responsible for the introduction of phenomenology into American social science and social theory. The introduction discusses the intellectual context of Schutz’s work in the problems of classic sociological theory relative to questions of subjectivity, interpretation, and meaning, its relation to more recent developments in social theory, including the recent cultural turn in the historical social sciences. The cultural turn restored the practice and perspective of interpretivism in historical social science, but drawing from intellectual resources other than the phenomenological tradition. One of the consequences of this was the effacement of the body and subjectivity from social theory. By drawing upon the intellectual resources of Schutz’s phenomenology, the book restores the role of situated subjectivity and embodied knowledge in historical social science. The introduction outlines the book’s organization into five chapters and their focus on the history of phenomenology in American social science, the concept of relevance and its extensions, the symbol concept in Schutz’s social theory, and Schutz’s sociology of knowledge.