Constitution and Social Structures. Revisiting the Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality

This study addresses the problem of ‘social structures’ from a phenomenological standpoint. My central claim is that, while classical and contemporary phenomenologists usually overlook social structures, they are key to making sense of the objectivity of the social world. This work proposes a way to accommodate this notion within a phenomenological framework and addresses the main constitutive issues related to structural phenomena. The study is divided into two Parts.Part I questions the reduction of social reality to sociality—which I label as ‘psychologism’—often implicitly assumed by phenomenologists. By examining the relationship between ontology, psychology, and phenomenology (Ch. 1), I argue that this reduction is not inborn to the phenomenological method and suggest an anti-psychologistic approach (Ch. 2). The central idea is that social reality encompasses not only persons and groups but also non-agential entities. To demonstrate this, I firstly propose construing ‘constitution’ not solely in intersubjective terms (as Schutz does) but as related to the interplay between subjects and social forms. Secondly, I put into relief Husserl's often-neglected concept of ‘social formation’, which designates non-agential social entities. Part II elaborates upon the notion of social structure and embed it within the revised phenomenological framework developed in Part I. To do so, I give prominence to the morphogenetic theory of critical realist sociologists and I contrast their approach with Berger and Luckmann’s account of the agency-structure problem—arguably the most advanced analysis developed within the phenomenological tradition. This analysis shows that Berger and Luckmann do not offer a viable model to conceptualize structures, as they propose an overly idealistic conception of ‘social structures’ (Ch. 3). Thus, I emphasize the importance of the notion of ‘material structures’ (as opposed to cultural phenomena) advocated by critical realists and show how phenomenology can describe it (Ch. 4). To this end, firstly, I propose to embed the phenomenological model of ‘constitution’ within a socio-ontological emergentist theory and provide a phenomenological characterization of structures in terms of ‘objective systems of motivations and practical possibilities.’ Secondly, I present my revisited model of social constitution and explain how subjective experience is constitutive of social structures, by identifying three issues, i.e., the givenness, the reproduction, and transformation of social structures.