Abrams and Historical Sociology

In explaining the foundations of the discipline known as historical sociology—the examination of history using the methods of sociology—historical sociologist Philip Abrams argues that, while people are made by society as much as society is made by people, sociologists’ approach to the subject is usually to focus on only one of these at the same time constructed by their society. Abrams refers to this continuous process as “structuring.”

Abrams also sees history as the result of structuring. People, both individually and as members of collectives, make history. But our making of history is itself formed and informed not only by the historical conditions we inherit from the past, but also by the prior formation of our own identities and capacities, able to act, and that partially determines the sorts of actions we are able to perform.

In Abrams’s analysis, historical structuring, like social structuring, is manifold and unremitting. To understand it, historical sociologists must extract from it certain significant episodes, or events, that their methodology can then analyze and interpret. According to Abrams, these events are points at which action and contingency meet, points that represent a cross and fourth, analysis of the consequences of the event both for history and for the individual.