On the Beginning of Social Inquiry.

explains in his Preface, he, as a former student of Schutz's, took on the task of completing this book. The assumption shared by Luckmann and Schutz's widow was that this work would be of considerable use to students of Schutz and indispensable to specialists in his thought. After fifteen years, the first part of the Structuren der Lebenswelt now appears (translated from the German, but apparently published before the German edition), containing the first four chapters of the complete book. The second volume, provisionally heralded to appear within a year, will contain the last two chapters, and will also reproduce Schutz's original plans, working papers and manuscripts. Given its relatively limited aim, that is a more systematic presentation of Schutz's ideas than was available in I959, the book might now be thought unnecessary for all but the specialists. In the intervening years, the scattered articles have been collected together into three volumes, and these will be by no means superseded in content by the new book, since Luckmann states he has found nothing in the manuscripts concerning the methodological implications for the social sciences which go beyond already published and quite well-known articles such as 'Commonsense and Scientific Interpretation of Human Action', and therefore is omitting the chapter on these questions from the plan of this new book. For the general student, then, whose reading of Schutz must be limited by constraints of time, The Structures of the Life-World may prove irrelevant. As for the specialists, Luckmann has provided them with their infinite task. Thesis-writers will now try to solve the problem which Luckmann himself claims not to be able to solve, namely which ideas are Schutz's and which Luckmann's, a problem in many ways irrelevant to the growth of human knowledge, but one which will inevitably be asked in conditions where ideas are treated as a form of private property. A short review does not allow detailed analysis of such a complex work. Those sections of this volume which are worth a trip are the section on relevance in Ghapter 3, which is a much clearer presentation than that in the larger relevance manuscript published by Richard M. Zaner under the title Re0!ections on the Problem of Relevance, though the problems treated are not identical, and Chapter 4, entitled 'Knowledge and Society', which is where Luckmann himself has most had to expand on Schutz's notes. ;Norman Stockman King's CMollege, Aberdeen