William H. Sewell, Jr

(Full text in Dutch)

Twenty years after 9/11, this thesis examines its construction as a historical event. After all, the event holds a remarkable position in contemporary conceptions of history, where a whole host of political, cultural and religious fault lines meet. In fact, 9/11 poses an outstanding problem for historians: how can we understand such a dramatic and contested event at all? This objective is split into two main components. On the one hand, the operation of the historical event itself is examined. The idea of the historical event occupies a central place in the idea of history, since it makes history conceivable. At the same time it also constitutes the very locus of the disruption and contestation of history, and thus makes history inconceivable. On the other hand, this thesis investigates what the idea of a historical event tells us about the historian's craft.

By means of an examination of existing theoretical research into the idea of a historical event, this thesis also develops its own position. It examines the way in which the historical event operates in a political manner, as well as its relationship to the modern historical discourse. It then examines the complex relationship between the constructive and disruptive nature of the historical event from the perspective of the philosophy of history of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). Benjamins philosophical characterisation of the relationship between history and politics is an excellent paradigm for dealing with the problem of the historical event. On the basis of Benjamins philosophy, on the one hand, a conceptual framework is developed to deal with the disruptive activity of the historical event. On the other hand, a renewed philosophical position on the nature of history is also derived from it that can serve as a charter for the historian: a nihilistic historical discourse.

This thesis also argues in a more general sense about the discipline of history that the traditional distinction between speculative and critical philosophy of history is not tenable. From a renewed autonomy of a philosophical consideration of history, the nihilistic historical discourse puts forward three main principles: an expansion of the representability of history, a more reflexive space for a critical interaction with historical thought and its presuppositions, and a rehabilitation of the value of speculation.

Grade: 16/20
Word count: 52.687

This essay surveys the contributions of Bill Sewell’s Logics of History, arguing that the book sketches a compelling agenda for an integrated historical social science. I first summarize Sewell’s theoretical agenda as a set of ontological and epistemological claims concerning social structure and event, history and temporality, and sociohistorical causality. I then discuss five main areas in which remaining ambiguities in Sewell’s approach might be clarified or his arguments pushed further. These are: (1) The relationship between historical event and traumatic event; (2) Structure and anti-structure, in relation to the idea of the “unprecedented event”; (3) The theory of semiosis underlying Sewell’s notion of a multiplicity of structures; (4) The compatibilities and differences between the concepts of structure and social mechanism (here I argued that social structures are the distinctive “mechanisms” of the human or social sciences); (5) a possible integration of the concepts of “mode of regulation” and “field.”