 Vienna-born Alfred Schutz joined the artillery division of the Austrian army during World War I and served on the Italian front before returning to pursue studies at the University of Vienna. There Schutz studied law, social science, and business with renowned figures such as Hans Kelsen and Ludwig von Mises, but his most significant educational experience occurred while he was a member of the Mises Circle, one of many Viennese circles, of which the “Schlick Circle” was the most famous. In the interdisciplinary Mises Circle, Schutz formed friendships that would continue throughout the cataclysmic decades of the 1930s and 1940s and that included, among others, economists Gottfried von Haberler, Friedrich A. von Hayek, Fritz Machlup, Oskar Morgenstern, philosopher Felix Kaufmann, and political scientist Eric Voegelin. While continuing to pursue his academic interests, in 1927 Schutz was named executive officer of Reitler and Company, a leading Viennese banking firm with international business relations, and thus he commenced a life-long pattern that led Edmund Husserl to describe him as “a banker by day and a philosopher by night.”