However, none of the "people's historians" has been able to move beyond a research emphasis on "the people" to an adequate theoretical formulation and statement of methodology. If "the people" is more than a demographic category, what concept does it signify? Clearly, more is involved than adding one part of a population, that which has been neglected, to another, that which has provided the traditional information base. The post-Thompson cohort of "people's historians" has forced us to reconsider issues in the philosophy of history that had been thought virtually solved-witness the debate between Thompson and Anderson so prominent five years ago-but has not yet reconsidered the implications of its own work for the theoretical status and significance of key descriptive categories, institution, experience, process, structure, group, society, which have done so much intellectual mischief in the past. The new emphasis on sociology is, to be sure, an advance for historiography; but only if the categories of sociology are subjected to the serious