Both are reflections of society. Each concept has a history, an evolving social function. Reviewing books is roughly contemporaneous with the rise of literary and academic periodicals around 1700, though literary criticism is at least as old as Aristotle. Likewise, libraries go back to ancient royal or ecclesiastical collections, but are transformed by the spread of literacy and printing. The purpose of the library of Assurbanipal at Nineveh had little in common with that of Thomas Carlyle's brainchild in St. James's Square, in which I sit, and neither had quite the same uses as virtual libraries in cyberspace.
Social construction is an all-purpose method of relativizing any object of criticism.
Hacking is a Canadian philosopher of science, with important studies of probability and psychology to his name. He is no less at home in Continental philosophy and social theory than in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. He looks at how constructionists apply these levels of criticism, ranging from the mere historicizing of gender, race, the economy or the self through an ironical disillusionment to unmasking or revolution. He distinguishes between interactive constructions, such as ''women refugees'' who create themselves by reacting to their situation, and indifferent or inanimate kinds that are constructed by others, such as scientists. Social'' is often redundant, while the uses of the metaphor of construction in philosophy by Kant, Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Nelson Goodman and Thomas Kuhn, while valid, have little to do with its usage among today's theorists.