Introduction

Alfred Schutz's life-world theory aims at working out the a priori, that is, historically and culturally universal, features of social reality (see Eberle 2009, 493). As he suggests in a 1940 paper, the eidetic insights provided by his constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude are valid for describing sociocultural worlds as different as that of a “sixty-year old Chinese Buddhist in the time of the Ming dynasty” and that of a “twenty-year old American Christian” of the twentieth century (Schutz 1964, 72). However, and this is the starting point of my reflections in this chapter, a large number of the examples he uses to illustrate his aprioristic theory are taken from Western modern societies.

The ordinary actors he describes are very often citizens of nation-states (Schutz 1964, 255–56), work as salespersons (123), businesswomen (120–21) or laborers in big factories (Schutz 2016, 271) and use money (258) to consume industrial products such as shaving creams (Schutz 1964, 71). They live in cities (66), drive cars (120–21) and travel by means of public transportation like the subway (94) or the railroad (102). And besides making phone calls (71) and utilizing the postal service (Schutz 1962, 25–26), they are users of mass media such as radio, newspapers and cinema (Schutz 1964, 118).

As I shall show in this chapter, the predominantly modern character of Schutz's examples is far from being anecdotal. Rather, it testifies both to his interest in theorizing about modern societies and to the ability of his life-world analysis to account for their peculiarities. Based on this conviction, the thesis I want to defend here is that Schutzian phenomenology makes relevant contributions to a sociological theory of modernity. To be sure, these contributions are mostly implicit and rudimentary—or, to put it phenomenologically, they remain at the margin of Schutz's theoretical attention. For, as many of the most prominent Schutz scholars agree, the main and explicit aim of his work was always to provide a “philosophical foundation to the methodology of the social sciences” (Eberle 2009, 493; see Barber 2021; Embree 2021).

With very few exceptions (see Schlembach 2019; García 2008), Schutz's rudimental contributions to a theory of modern society have been systematically neglected in the secondary literature.