prendergast 2006 review of barber's biography of schutz

8/13/2019 Prendergast 2006 Review of Barber's Biography of Schutz

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Journal of Economic Behavior & OrganizationVol. 60 (2006) 439447

Book review

Personal ethics, understanding, and participatory democracy: Michael D. Barbersnew biography of Alfred Schutz

A review and discussion of: Michael D. Barber, TheParticipating Citizen: A Biography

of Alfred Schutz, State University of New York Press, Albany, NY, 2004, 229 pp. plusNotes and Bibliography. NPL.

The AustrianAmerican phenomenologist, sociologist, and methodologist of social sci-ence Alfred Schutz [18991959] is now the beneciary of a second intellectual biography just 21 years after the rst ( Wagner, 1983 ). While Wagners original biography remainsindispensable, the new one surpasses it in several respects. More conventional in struc-ture, more readable from start to nish, and unied under a captivating interpretive thesis,Michael D. Barbers The Participating Citizen immediately becomes the rst stop for new-

comers seeking to disentangle the wondrous complexity of Schutzs thought. That doesnot render the earlier biography redundant, for Wagner tracks Schutzs evolving, syntheticmind better than Barber, while Barber foregrounds things that Wagner omitted or elided.Chief among the latter are issues of personality, family life, work life, hardship, politics,and ethical conductthe human side of Schutz that Wagner set aside in order to concen-trate on his mentors intellectual inuences and unpublished work. By highlighting Schutzspersonal ethical conduct and the ethical implications of his theory of understanding ( Ver-stehen ), Barber portrays the man and the scholar as an integral whole. The sharper focusenables Barber to discern more clearly the inuence of the Austrian school of economicson Schutzs methodological writings, normative beliefs, and political philosophy. It alsoallows him to develop a thesis (based on Embree, 1999 ) regarding the relationship betweenSchutzs ethical excellence in personal relations, his theory of understanding, and hislater writings on equality and human rights. In the unifying motif of the book, Schutz is theparticipating citizen committed to the ourishing of family, friendship, democracy, andliberal education.

To emphasize what is new and fresh in Barbers biography, I will concentrate this reviewon the participating citizen thesis while leaving aside Schutzs relationship to the phe-nomenological movement and his contributions to sociology and methodology. Barbersthesis, in a nutshell, is this: Alfred Schutz led an exemplary ethical life and held admirablydemocratic and humane beliefs. However, his commitment to value neutrality led him to

0167-2681/$ see front matter 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2005.06.001


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shun normative inquiry. Only after being accused by two of his closest friends of nihilismand relativism in the 1940s did value neutrality loosen its grip on his pen. Finally, on theheels of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. SupremeCourts Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision, Schutz not only began to takenormative stands in his writing, but to ground them in his theory of understanding. In sodoing, he forged an innovative, hermeneutic approach to ethical practice, and gave us a newway to characterize his intellectual development.

The thesis integrates a good number of biographical facts and one important intellectualtransition. It also draws out the dialogic implications of Schutzs theory of understanding,a concern that has long been central to hermeneutic theory. But it contains two inexplicablelacunae: Schutzs career in banking and his political activism during Austrias transitionto democracy in the 1920s. Moreover, it fails to explore the social and intellectual under-pinnings of Schutzs ideal type of the well-informed citizen, the stress point at which hisproposed hermeneutic ethic of participation fractures into the familiar shapes of democraticelitism. I begin with the evidence that supports the thesis.

1. From personal ethics to participatory democracy

At the base of Barbers thesis is the evidence of Schutzs ethical excellence in personalrelations. It is a solid foundation. By all accounts, Schutz was a loving husband and father,a man blessed with numerous friendships of long duration and great intimacy, and a pillarof responsibility and collegiality in his group afliations, be they a Saturday afternoonquartet, the bank that employed him for 30 years, the editorial board of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , or his university, the New School for Social Research. Barbercites several instances of caring concern, self-sacrice, and conict mediation in each of these domains of relationship. The most admiration-inducing examples, however, stem fromSchutzs efforts to extract family, friends, and scholar friends-of-friends from Europe afterthe Nazis annexed his native Austria in March of 1938. Schutz was in Paris at the timeof the takeover, his parents, mother-in-law, wife, 5-year-old daughter, and 1-month-oldson trapped in Vienna. Setting aside his scholarship, Schutz turned his studio apartment inParis into a communications center for refugees. Friends wrote to him about their arrests,property conscations, and uncertainties regarding their legal status (Jews could not becitizens of the legal ction called the Reich and their civil rights evaporated quickly). Hewrote to ofcials, legal experts, and non-Jewish friends for assistance. He helped with joband apartment searches, arranged afdavits and visas, and found housing in England fordisplaced Jewish children. In November 1938, armed Nazis entered his parents apartmentin Prague, conscated 8500 marks they had raised to pay an excise tax, and ordered themto leave the building in 3 days.

In spite of all this bad news, Schutz pressed on, engaging in numerous services onbehalf of others: arranging immigration details, answering immigration queries, pur-suing passport inquiries, transferring bank accounts, recovering lost funds, providinginvestment information, advising (Fritz Machlup) regarding stock accounts, referringpeople to American contacts, writing letters of recommendation, and explainingFrances Aryan/Jewish marriage laws (Barber, 2004: p. 75).


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Evidence of Schutzs humane and democratic beliefs is more difcult to adduce, for (asBarber would have it) value neutrality discouraged political, economic, and cultural critiqueand advocacy. However, evidence of Schutzs liberal sentimentsthe second leg of theparticipating citizen thesiscan be found in a diary he kept during a 7-week business trip toNew York City and Chicago in 1937. Along with trepidations over American anti-Semitismand praise for the cities world-class art museums and orchestras, Schutz wrote criticallyabout the treatment of women in the Sears catalog department and of AfricanAmericanmeat packers at the Swift plant he visited, and decried the extreme rationalization of thelabor process he observed in both places. He also found the banking community grudginglysupportive of Roosevelts interventions in the economy, yet anxious to rescind the rightsof labor (Barber, 2004: pp. 6772). Wagner (1983: p. 12) had noted that Schutz did notsubscribe to the extreme economic liberalism of Mises and Hayek, but he failed to providethe evidence supporting that conclusion. The dairy of 1937 provides it.

The participating citizen thesis hinges on Schutzs changing attitude toward the method-ological principle of value neutrality. The principle was upheld by every one of his earlymentorseconomist Ludwig von Mises, sociologist Max Weber, and philosopher of lawHans Kelsenand by most of his friends in the Mises circle, such as F.A. Hayek andFritz Machlup. It sharply distinguishes fact from value and enjoins the social scientist frommaking value judgments about states of affairs. Value neutrality is intimately associatedwith methodological subjectivism (the injunction to ground social science concepts andgeneralizations on the facts of actors subjective beliefs) andmore controversiallywithskepticism about the rational justiability and universality of any single value or hierarchy

of values. Schutzs commitments to value neutrality and methodological subjectivism werenever in doubt, but Barber (2004: p. 56) also quotes him as saying in 1953 that Values arethe irrational as such, thus embracing skepticism as well. One consequence of this com-bination of premises is political quietism. Barber portrays Schutz as adopting a quietisticattitude during the 1920s, gradually becoming more assertive in his diaries and correspon-dence, and nally speaking up for human rights and civil rights in the last decade of hislife. Unhappily for this scenario, the supposed quietism of the 1920s marked the highpointof Schutzs political life, as I explain below.

As Barber develops his thesis, Schutzs quietism escaped challenge until the 1940s.The essay that provoked the challenge was a seemingly innocuous piece of verstehende

Sociologie , The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology [1944]. When Schutz rst readthe paper to the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, many in theaudience, like Schutz, Jews who had been forced to ee the Nazis, were appalled that henot only failed to condemn anti-Semitism but seemed to equate voluntary emigration withethnic cleansing by treating both phenomena under the same, value-neutral concepts of assimilation and adjustment to the new home environment. When the paper appeared inprint, his friend Aron Gurwitsch accused him of nihilism, which led to an estrangementthat lasted a year. Schutz considered his concept of relevancea term that combinesthe meanings of interest and valuationas one of his most important contributions tosocial science. Yet, in 1952, the political theorist Eric Voegelin, a friend from his Viennadays, accused him of relevance relativism for refusing to critique the interest and valuehierarchies of the homecomer, the stranger, and other personal ideal types that populatedSchutzs sociological essays (Barber, 2004: pp. 117130.)


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These reactions, Barber hypothesizes, jolted Schutz into a more value-expressive mode.He detects a change of tone in The Well-Informed Citizen [1946]: Usually reticent onvalue questions, he at this point endorsed a normative notion of democracy, in which theopinion of the well-informed citizen as opposed to that of the uninformed man on thestreet ought to prevail (Barber, 2004: p. 140). Barber declines to explore the sources andimplications of this normative view, which has the effect of privileging the opinions of thosewho can interrogate the experts, namely, the better educated and more articulate.

Value neutrality, Barber continues, was nally overcome in Schutzs writings on equalityin the mid-1950s. Stimulated by the U.N.s Declaration of Human Rights and by the U.S.Supreme Courts decision in Brown , these writingsone publication and two conferencecircularsclearly reveal Schutzs growing comfort with normative inquiry and his supportfor extending human and civil rights. Yet he endorsed no policy or statute that wouldadvance these rights. On the contrary, his one published essay on civil rights, Equalityand the Meaning Structures of the Social World [1955], concludes by disclaiming equalityof opportunity in the sense of an equal start for everyone and recommending insteadsomething far more modest, namely, the maximum of self-realization which [ones]situation in social reality permits ( 1964: p. 273 ). Noting in one of the circulars that somebarriers to opportunity were deeply embedded in existing social structures, he warned of moving too quickly on the legal front, lest doing so generate a backlash among those whowould perceive the removal of barriers to formal equality as the granting of special rightsto minorities.

In retrospect, one can interpret the last remarks as prophetic: the response to court-

ordered integration was white ight and Christian academies, leaving public schools andtheir neighborhoodsmore segregated than ever. Just as readily, one can hear in his remarks onequality classically conservative skepticism about legal reform from above.Rhetorically, hiswords echo the warnings of Edmund Burke, whose brief against reason-inspired episodesof nation-building had been updated by Hayek in The Road to Serfdom [1944], a book Schutz once gave to a colleague as a present (Barber, 2004: p. 159). Unlike Wagner, whotended to downplay the inuence of the Austrian school, Barber makes it central to histhesis: he assigns it the role of a conscience check on hubris. One can hear echoes hereof [Carl] Menger and Hayek on how rationalistic interventions into organically developedsocial systems can do more harm than good . . . Just as Hayek argued that gradually and

organically evolving socialandeconomic systems resisted rationalistic tinkering, so Schutzsounded a realist note, warning against any rush into ethical actions without consideringtheir consequences and implications (Barber, 2004: p. 192, 188).

It is hard to believe that Barber, the author of Equality and Diversity: Phenomenological Investigationsof Prejudice and Discrimination (2001) , is entirely happy with this resolution.The narrative sets up the reader to expect, at last, an unambiguous expression of value ideals.But when readers get to the dramatic unfurling, the ag is missing some of its stars andstripesthe ones that call for action rather than talk. Schutz conquered value neutralityin the sense of overcoming the taboo on the public disclosure of value preferences. Butbreaking the taboo only reveals a deeper commitment to a program of social change thatallows institutionalized injustice to persist as long as the uninformed man on the streetaccommodates it. Perhaps Gurwitsch, Voegelin, and the Graduate Faculty were right to ndsomething amiss in Schutzs reaction to forced emigration.


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The nal leg of the participating citizen thesis relies less on texts and correspondence thanon an implication of Schutzs lifelong preoccupation with intersubjective understanding.Barber draws out the values that are implicit in the notions of listening to the other andnding a common ground for dialogue, such as respect for the others point of view. Hewrites (2004: p. 194):

[I]n these political writings he saw his way through to a value of ethical ultimacy,capable of being articulated as a principle to govern democratic andpoliticalpractices:namely, that individuals opinions deserved to be heard and appreciated. Such anethical principle is unique in that it does not suppress theothers subjective perspectivebut requires that it be taken seriously into account. Furthermore, this principle isentirely formal, mandating that one hear and appreciate the others opinion, regardlessof its material content, and the principle does not oblige one to agree in any way with

the opinion that the other expresses, merely that such an opinion be heard. As aresult, the principle, by its imperative force and its formality, does not commit to anyone viewpoint that might foster intolerance toward other viewpoints; it thus displaysthe value freedom and openness to a diversity of motivation endemic to Austrianeconomics and Weberian sociology without succumbing to ethical relativism.

The imperative force of this principle is factually nil in the real world of democraticpolitics, so, not surprisingly, Barber (2004: p. 191) quotes some unpublished sentences onthe virtues of small publics. As a proposal for democratic revitalization, the mandate tohear and appreciate the others opinion brings to mind Habermas ideal speech situation,

except the latter came bundled with concrete suggestions for empowering the unvoiced.As in his response to Brown , Schutzs concerns run in the opposite direction: the pointof view of the well-informed citizenthe person of higher human, cultural and thereforesocial capitalis the one which ought to prevail, and the small public is the setting mostconducive to that outcome. The upper middle class tilt in Schutzs political philosophyevades his biographers notice.

2. Lacunae

The participating citizen thesis organizes the intellectual biography remarkably well.Where Wagner had concluded his book on a tragic notethe premature death of a greatthinker whowas unable to execute his nal work, the posthumous Structures of the Lifeworld [1973]Barber ends his on the heroic note of the practical ethicist who nally found hispublic voice over the issues of civil rights and human rights, anddespite a few cautiousnotesstill managed to be a decade ahead of the liberal pack. While acknowledging thethesis effectiveness as rhetorical device, I have drawn attention to the ways it convertsinaction, hermeneutic utopianism, and class disposition into centrist virtues. It is as if, inorder to praise his biographical subject, Barber had to reduce participatory democracy to ascale that makes him loom large in the frame.

In addition to these problems, the thesis exhibits two rather large lacunae, Schutzs careerin banking and his role in establishing a modern banking system in Austria after World WarI. It is not that Barber fails to discuss these involvements. Indeed, he provides valuable


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new information about both of them. He just treats these involvements as biographical factsirrelevant to his portrait of Schutz as a practical ethicist and advocate for participatorydemocracy. As Wagner did before him, Barber considers Schutzs banking career as adistraction from his intellectual pursuits, rather than a guide to his political and ethicalphilosophy and conception of the life-world. But Schutzs adventures in banking overlapand reinforced his engagement with Austrian economics, whose inuence on his politicalphilosophy Barber already conceded. Let me review the new information and show whereit raises unanswered questions.

In 1927 (Wagner gave the date as 1929) Schutz joined Reitler and Company, a small,private, international bank headquartered in Vienna as a corporate attorney. The bank intro-duced Austrian shares at foreign stock exchanges; arranged and underwrote internationalloans forAustrian provinces, communities, andindustries; nanced exports andimports; andmanaged investments (Barber, 2004: p. 19). In the course of his career, Schutz supervisedthe work of 60 people, served on the boards of multinational corporations, reorganized theinternational holdings of Heineken and the French brewer Gaston, Dreyfus and Cie, helpedto establish an ofce in New York, and supervised the legal work creating industrial enter-prises in Canada, Mexico, and USA (Barber, 2004: pp. 1920). This is far greater executiveresponsibility than Wagner had recounted. Did Schutz have any ethical qualms about thebanking business or the companies for which Reitler provided legal and nancial services?Did he see international trade and investment as producing positive externalities acrossthe board or a mix of positive and negative externalities? The branch of ethics mediatingthe personal and the civiceconomic ethicsplays no role in the biographical or ethical

narrative.Barber does describe, for the rst time, Schutzs rocky relationship with Robert Lambert,one of Reitlers top ofcers and his immediate supervisor. Lambert would give Schutz tasksthat other executives failed to accomplish, schedule trips abroad during his vacations (theonly time he could concentrate on his writing), and forget these impositions when adjustinghis salary. Moreover, one day Lambert expected Schutz to use his own initiative and thenext to be his mouthpiece (Barber, 2004: p. 20), thus placing him in a chronic double-bindsituation. Wagner (1983: p. 17) had said that banking was lowest on [Schutzs] scales of relevancies, implying that the work itself was devalued in his eyes. Ilse Schutz said herhusband certainly did not love his other profession (Barber, 2004: p. 20). Was it just

his relationship to Lambert that soured his taste for banking or was the whole companyriddled with inequities? Was Schutz complicit in conduct he deemed ethically suspect?How did Schutz treat the employees under his own supervision? For a biographer whorelies so heavily on his subjects ethical excellence, the inattention to the ethical aspects of the workplace is surprising.

But the second lacuna is even more egregious than the rst. Barber pays insufcientattention to Schutzs most extensive involvement in public life, the 6 years (19211927) hespent as executivesecretaryof theAssociation of Austrian MiddleBanks (Wagner hadcalledit the Austrian Banking Association). During those 6 years, Austria established a centralbank, reformed its currency, and brought under control the hyperination7000 percentduring 19211922that had wiped out the savings of many Austrians. Barbers account of Schutzs work at the association is even sketchier than Wagners, but he reveals, for the rsttime, that Schutz took part in the negotiations that led to the creation of the central bank


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from Austrian policy discourse. Mises could claim that economics abstains from any judgment of value (1966: p. 10) only because he embedded his preferred values in thepraxeological idea that acting man chooses (1966: p. 12). All the schools libertarianpolicies ow logically from that premise, which is proffered as value-free but is in factsaturated with values. The concept of value neutrality, so central to Barbers thesis, deservescloser analysis than it receives in this book.

Value freedom entails more than self-discipline with respect to expression of ad hocvalue judgments. Value freedom for the Austrian economists entailed the installation of constitutional conditions that were immune to democratic meddling, as well as the creationof institutional conditions that could be adjusted within xed limits under changing cir-cumstances. As far as economic policy was concerned, the set of well-informed citizenswas limited to lawmakers, lobbyists, and a few outside experts. Underlying Schutzs ideal-istic principles of democratic participation lay his experience as a policy-maker in postwarVienna, when the views of the spokesman for the Austrian Association of Middle Bankswere always respectfully heard and appreciated.

This has been long, highly selective review. In hewing so closely to Barbers thesis, Imay give readers the misimpression that he has written a narrowly focused book. Suchis not the case. The life and work of Alfred Schutz is presented in its entirety in crisp,economical prose. Each of his major writings and many of his unpublished ones receivebrief, judicious synopses that will please newcomers and Schutz scholars alike. The wholegamut of Schutzs teachers, friends, family, and colleagues come alive in Barbers hands.Scholars who have written on Schutzs relationship to, say, Felix Kaufmann or Hans Kelsen,

may not nd the depth of treatment that would spur them on to new work, but they are likelyto feel that he nailed down the social aspects of their connection just right. Moreover, hecovers aspects of Schutz life that Wagner skimmed over, such as his career as a soldier in theFirst World War, his marriage, and his ambitions for the New School for Social Research,such as using philosophical anthropology as the unifying principle of liberal education atthe school. The books greatest achievement, though, is its success in portraying AlfredSchutz as an integral personality. After reading this book, one can understand why the manwas loved by so many, for he enriched their lives through his conversation, integrity, and joie de vivre . Similarly, one can understand why the theory of understanding was so centralto his intellectual work. Schutz scholars owe Michael D. Barber a large debt of gratitude

for bring the human side of Alfred Schutz into sharp relief.To end this review on the right note, I relate the nal words Schutz spoke from his

deathbed. They were directed to his wife, Ilse. His last words were, Even now you arewonderful (Barber 2004: p. 22).

References

Barber, M.D., 2001. Equity and Diversity: Phenomenological Investigations of Prejudice and Discrimination.Humanity Books, Amherst.

Embree, L., 1999. The ethical-political side of Schutz: his contributions at the 1956 Institute on ethics concernedwith barriers to equality of opportunity. In: Embree, L. (Ed.), Schutzian Social Science. Kluwer, Dordrecht,pp. 235318.

von Mises, L., 1966. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Henry Regnery, Chicago.


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Prendergast, C., 2001. By way of deduction: Schutzs essay on taxation. The Review of Austrian Economics 14(2/3), 145156.

Schutz, A., 1927. Besteuerung der Kapitalsertr agnisse im zwichenstaatlichen Verkehr zwichen Deuschland und Osterreich. Mitteilungen des Verbandes

Osterreichischer Banken und Bankiers 9, 9299.Schutz, A., 1964. Equity and the Meaning Structure of the Social World. Collected Papers: Studies in Social

Theory, vol. II. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, pp. 226273.Wagner, H., 1983. Alfred Schutz: An Intellectual Biography. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Christopher Prendergast Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington IL 61702-2900, USA

E-mail address: [email protected]

13 June 2005Available online 19 August 2005

prendergast 2006 review of barber's biography of schutz

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