 Cohen was subsequently persuaded (by Wright) that this distinction between restricted and inclusive historical materialism is better understood in the light of a “prior distinction” between Marxist theory of history and Marxist sociology (G. Cohen 1988: 176–177). Marxist theory of history is identified with the restricted variant, and the familiar Marxist claims that the latter refrained from affirming (about the economic explaining the principal features of non-economic life) are now allocated to Marxist sociology. Where Marxist theory of history is concerned with the issue of how social formations succeed one another, Marxist sociology is concerned with how the elements within a social formation are related. The latter, but not the former, insists that non-economic structures and modes of consciousness are, in their broad outlines, explained by material and economic factors. The two theories are often conflated, but they are sufficiently distinct that they require independent assessment (G. Cohen 1988: 178).