I’m reading a forum in Social Science History on William H. Sewell, Jr.‘s Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation. The forum includes contributions from George Steinmetz, Dylan Riley, David Pedersen, and Sewell himself in a final response. This is my first encounter with Sewell or any of his work. As someone who only finished his dissertation in 2006, it would be tempting to blame my graduate program (Loyola University Chicago) for this ignorance. That would be unfair. I took my first and only historiography-focused graduate course in the fall of 1998. If I read Riley’s outline of Sewell’s Read more