Who said that narrative history writing based on the concept of time is like constructing a…

Causation is a concept of such fundamental importance to historical understanding that E.H. Carr, in his G.M. Trevelyan lectures of 1961, declared the study of history to be the study of causes. But postmodernist thinking on the issue of historical causation is different. John Vincent would abandon the search for causes as futile and rather look for explanations. Writing in 1976, Theodore Zeldin thought of causation and chronology as the two tyrants of historians. Hayden White attacked the concept of causation as depriving people of their freedom of action in the present and trapping them in an inescapable network of causation. Postmodernist theory installs interpretation in the place of empirical research into the causes of specific events. Since the notion of cause depends on sequential time, some postmodernists attack the latter too. The cause of an occurrence must obviously come before it in time. But the postmodernist historian and philosopher Ankersmit says that the writing of historical narrative based on the concept of time is building on quicksand. The postmodernists would prefer that the idea of sequential time be abandoned in the writing of history. Richard Evans shows how the very idea of the postmodern is paradoxical, for it is contrary to the assertion that there are no time periods in history. The linear and sequential concept of time is far too powerful a principle to be dispensed with, for it is not an intellectual construct but a matter of everyday experience for people the world over. Time itself may be without boundaries, but in terms of human life it passes, and has limits.