A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible

operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article

attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as

conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal

comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births,

both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing

over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought

and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated

an understanding of the present condition of the human world as

developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the

second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition

as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior

existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a

comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated

subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable

and represent two distinct ways of historicization.