Structure and history

The ‘historical logic’ in E. P. Thompson’s approaches and Marshall Sahlins’ “theory of history”

Abstract

This article intends to analyze how the historian E. P. Thompson and the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins reflected on temporality in/of historical processes through their approaches to structure and history. Based on a bibliographic analysis, I evaluate the points of approximation, of encounters and disagreements, of Thompson's "historical logic" and a "theory of history" of Sahlins, pointing out, from this reflection, how the fields of history and anthropology approached, notably from c.1970, greatly impacting an approach to social history in which structures are contained in history and are subjected to the contingency of human action-experience, in a constant dialectical movement. Finally, I conclude that the approximation between E. P. Thompson and Marshall Sahlins lies in the centrality, for both, of the action-experience-of-subjects, which, for them, informs about the event-atypical-singular-event and the structures of repetition in the history; on the other hand, historical materialism, from which a different conception of praxis-agency derives, distances them. But it is in the temporal plurality of history that they meet.