Schutz’s Thesis and the Moral Basis for Humanistic Sociology

Abstract

At the end of his extensive survey of empirical studies on the relationship between people‘s sentiments and acts, Deutscher concludes that forty years of positivist research has not been able to produce consistent insights. He suggests that a “phenomenological perspective” might be more rewarding: “If I can come to see the world as [the man in the street] does, then I can come to understand the relationship between his talk and his action as he does.“¹ Characteristic for the phenomenologist, according to Deutscher, is that he “seeks to understand the social world from the point of view of the actors in it.”² This idea of phenomenological sociology is not uncommon. It is also defended by Phillipson and his collegues in New Directions in Sociological Theory, as appears from the statement that “the intentionalist style, recommended by phenomenological sociology, gives primacy to the modes of attention the actor gives to his world, takes the problem of meaning as its starting point, and understands action in terms of man‘s meaningful projects.“³ And of course many other authors propose similar standpoints.