Durkheimian aspects of Schutz’s phenomenological sociology

Abstract

Schutz started his work neglecting Durkheim’s writings, then he approached them in a critical perspective and ended up finding significant congruences with his own views. This evolution has at least two consequences. In the light of our introductory concerns about how Schutz’s relation to Durkheim has been interpreted in the state of the art, one might say that the dominant view is convened on Schutz’s early positions, which did not make room for the French sociologist. However, in the light of our ending considerations, there is more to it than just establishing how distant or how close Schutz felt to Durkheim in different moments of his life. His late proximity is quite enlightening. If Schutz thought he could address, by his own means, core aspects of Durkheimian sociology, does not this mean that there might be in Durkheim’s sociology an “implicitly phenomenological approach”?I will propose that this is the case. Not only can we find in Durkheim a phenomenological perspective but also we can see that Schutz himself perceived this affinity.Indeed, it was Schutz’s opinion that collective consciousness is one of the mayor issues in the phenomenology of society. He incorporated it to a list of phenomenological topics to be addressed which he collected from the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Ortega y Gasset. Then he explored other concepts related to it such as objectivity, exteriority and social constraint.Accordingly, Schutz’s last word on Durkheim is that no matter how differently they might think about a number of issues, when it comes to social facts, they would both agree that they have an objectivity of their own whereby they are imposed on the individual with all the power of social constraint. In Schutzian words, social facts are phenomena endowed with an objectivity of their own, which is socially brought to bear by the group on the individual as relevances that one must take account of in order to find one’s bearings within them.