Abstract
Surveys the contributions of William H. Sewell, Jr.'s 'Logics of History' and concludes that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. The author first summarizes Sewell's ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history, and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. The author then discusses five main areas in which ambiguities in Sewell's approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed farther. These concern the relationship between historical event and traumatic event; the idea of the unprecedented event or "antistructure"; the theory of semiosis underlying Sewell's notion of a multiplicity of structures; and the compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and mechanism (social structures are the distinctive "mechanisms" of the human or social sciences). Finally, Sewell's call for "a more robust sense of the social" in historical writing locates the "social" mainly at the level of the metafield of power, or what regulation theory calls the mode of regulation; this society-level concept could be integrated with Pierre Bourdieu's theory of semiautonomous fields.