Shapes and Functions of Historical Events

‘Events’ is a key category in history and historiography. Quite paradoxically, however, its pervasiveness is inversely proportional to the scholarly attention it has garnered among theorists/philosophers of history. In the article, I address this understudied topic by taking seriously the prominent presence of a type of non-events in the thematic architecture of most histories: socio-cultural structures. A brief examination of these will provide a foil of contrast against which some general features of events can be reassessed. The juxtaposition will then be worked out to reveal that events serve differing functions in historical research and writing. Historical events, as will be elucidated, can be mobilized as ends or means of causal and intentional explanations; to exemplify continuities and changes in structures; as markers for subsequent memory processes; or in terms of their structure-upending effects. I do not argue for or against any of these roles, only that they are non-reducible to a putative meta-function. Such a view is pluralistic, though not exactly neutral, as it implies that the traditional discussion about the nature of historical explanation, while highly valuable, does not fully account for the nexus between events and historiography.