Alfred Schutz papers

The Alfred Schütz Papers consist of manuscripts, course and lecture materials, letters, documentation pertaining to various organizations with which he was affiliated, and personal papers documenting his life and work. The papers span the years 1868-2005, with the bulk concentrated in the two decades before Schütz's death, 1940-59.

Series I, Manuscripts , contains drafts of most of Schütz's essays. Most of the manuscript pages are individually stamped with consecutive numbers. This was apparently done by Lester Embree in 1971 when he prepared his An Outline of the Alfred Schütz Nachlass. His arrangement was based on the order in which he found the manuscripts in Schütz's bookcases. This arrangement has been preserved, as drafts of works were, for the most part, kept together, though the chronological order of the drafts may not be precise. Physical descriptions of the materials have been translated from German into English (e.g. fassung = draft), but titles have not been translated. An additional group of manuscripts donated in 1990 contained drafts of works already accounted for in the Embree listing. These new materials were integrated into the arrangement according to their titles, though they are unnumbered. Therefore, some works may have folders of numbered pages interfiled with folders of unnumbered pages.

Included in this series are drafts of Die Strukturen der Lebenswelt, Phänomenologie und Kulturwissenschaft, On Multiple Realities and Mozart and the Philosophers. Also found here are several essays on other influential writers, such as Edmund Husserl, Max Weber, T. S. Eliot and George Santayana.

In some instances, letters or printed materials were included in, and numbered along with, the drafts of manuscripts. These have been retained in their original places with the manuscripts, but cross-references have been made, where appropriate, from Series II, Subject Files and Correspondence

Series II, Teaching and Research Materials , consists of lecture and course materials prepared for classes which Schütz taught at the New School for Social Research, and reading notes by Schütz on various topics, most of which were realted to the social sciences. As with Series I, this group of materials consists of folders of numbered sheets interfiled with folders of unnumbered sheets.

Series III, Subject Files and Correspondence , contains letters, writings by others, and materials from organizations. These materials made up part of the 1990 donation and were received in an order apparently kept by Alfred Schütz. This group has been kept together in the original received order. Headings for persons and corporate groups are followed by subheadings indicating the type of materials present. (e.g. material relating to Dorion Cairns is divided into Correspondence and a draft of a manuscript).

Among the more complete collections of correspondence are those with H. L. van Breda, Marvin Farber, Eric Voegelin, Fritz Machlup, Maurice Natanson, Kurt Wolff, and with Aron Gurwitsch (this last group having been published as Philosophers in Exile, Richard Grathoff ed., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Other correspondents represented in this series include Raymond Aron, Kenneth Burke, Kurt Goldstein, Jean Hyppolite, Karl Löwith, Jacques Maritain, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karl Popper, Jacques Rueff, Meyer Schapiro, Leo Strauss, and Jean Wahl. Schütz often kept carbon copies of his letters to his many colleagues, so often, both sides of an epistolary exchange are extant in this archive.

Drafts of manuscripts from fellow social scientists such as Marvin Farber, Aron Gurwitsch, Eric Voegelin and Ludwig von Mises are found in this series. Schütz preserved an amount of correspondence and meeting literature for such events of the Colloque philosophique de Royaumont and the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion. Included among these are drafts of reports and comments by Schütz. Materials relating to Schütz's tenure at the New School for Social Research include correspondence and graduate faculty memos written by Schütz and others.

Among the Personal Papers in Series IV are résumé fragments and lists of Schütz's publications.

Series V, Additions Since 2003 , includes reproductions of annotations Schütz made to books in his library, now held at the Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv Konstanz. There are 44 reels of microfilm duplicating 162 titles and one CD. The reels include the full text of titles, with Schütz's annotations, and the CD contains JPEG images of pages with annotations in color and Word files documenting color annotations. The reels are arranged in alphabetical order by author and accompanied by a finding aid.

Series VIII, April 2013 Acquisition, consists of family correspondence, immigration documents, writings, genealogical materials, and other family papers.