Alfred Schutz and the Austrian Schools of Jurisprudence and Economics

Alfred Schutz, before entering in contact with phenomenology, was a student of law with Hans Kelsen and of economics with Ludwig von Mises. What Schutz thought they both lacked was a clear-cut consciousness of the methodological procedures that would allow them to build their respective sciences, jurisprudence and economics. In the wake of Max Weber’s distinction between subjective and objective meaning, Schutz thought that both social scientists had been able to find out the domains of invariance of legal and of economic acts, i.e., acts that pertain to the domain of the two sciences. That is where he thought that the contribution of phenomenology was indispensable; first, to disclose how juridical and economical typical acts are grounded in pre-scientific typifications of the world of human interactions; secondly, to show that the social scientists must resort to processes of idealization, such as the ones described by Husserl (namely, in Formal and Transcendental Logic) to grasp the main concepts of their sciences.