WHERE ARE THE LIVING A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE COLLECTED PAPERS OF ALFRED SCHUTZ.

In his book "Collected Papers," sociologist Alfred Schutz offers a thorough going critique of the discipline of sociology as it is usually conceived, and attempts to re-found sociology on the basis of a theory of consciousness. Schutz begins his reasoning with a brief examination of what sociology is and does. Sociology, in contrast to philosophy, is ordinarily conceived to have as its subject how men act. Sociology, then, must examine the empirical rather than the logical, possibilities open to men. Instead of asking how well a certain sociological theory relates to other theories in the field and instead of trying to gauge how well statements of theory relate to the data, Schutz focuses on the relation of both theory and data to the phenomenon itself, the phenomenon of man in a social world. In this way, Schutz challenges both the theory of sociology and its supportive data. But, there is an ironic turn in Schutz's argument. The problem of sociology is not that its empirical methods are incorrect, but rather that its theorizing is faulty. In other words, sociological data are inadequate not because sociologists are unable to "get at" the data of everyday life with scientific methods, but because they do not think properly.