TY  - JOUR
AB  - 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.
DA  - 2019
DO  - 10.1080/01916599.2019.1653351
KW  - historical change
KW  - historicism
KW  - constructionism
KW  - temporal comparison
KW  - historical time
LA  - eng
IS  - 8
M2  - 1171
PY  - 2019
SN  - 0191-6599
SP  - 1171-1190
T2  - History of European Ideas
TI  - Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0070-pub-29386899
Y2  - 2024-12-26T19:35:20
ER  -