In The Shadow Of Alfred Schutz: Two “Ordinary” Sociologists In Extraordinary Circumstances

Peter Berger (interviewed at Boston 22^nd October 2010) has qualified the three lecturers at the Graduate Faculty who most influenced both him and Thomas Luckmann as the “Holy Trinity”. The triumvirate was composed of Carl Mayer, Albert Salomon and Alfred Schutz. Though the latter has acquired a considerable reputation posthumously, Mayer and Salomon, apart from a short mention in the introduction to The Social Construction of Reality have been very little published and have remained almost entirely unnoticed. It is in this sense that they can be qualified as “ordinary” (that is to say not renowned) sociologists.

Their ordinariness contrasts with the extraordinary circumstances which affected their lives. Both Mayer and Salomon studied and eventually obtained positions in German universities during the first decades of the 20^th century and both emigrated to the United-States at the beginning of the 1930s to become members of the Graduate Facultyof the New School for Social Research (Salomon was Jewish and Mayer married to a Jewish woman). Archival material, the few published documents available and my interviews with Berger and Luckmann lead me to suggest that the reasons for the lack of impact differ. Though Mayer headed a research project on religion in Germany he never succeeded in publishing the results of his study. Salomon’s work was largely theoretical and did give rise to some publications; others were rejected as inappropriate for American audiences.

By contextualizing the production of these two men I will try to explain some of the reasons for their academic in-success. Where they really so “ordinary”?

This will of course lead me to examine the criteria by which success is established in academia.