Alfred Schutz

Alfred Schutz (1899–1959) was an Austrian social philosopher and sociologist whose phenomenological approach to the social world laid the groundwork for the sociology of knowledge and influenced generations of social theorists including Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, and Niklas Luhmann. A student of the economist Ludwig von Mises and deeply influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, Schutz developed the concept of the life-world (Lebenswelt) — the pre-theoretical, taken-for-granted reality within which all social action and scientific inquiry occurs. His central insight was that the social world is experienced not as an objective structure but as a world