Direction for [ Question No: 71 To 74 ] :
Read the following passage carefully and choose the correct answer of the questions that follow :
Causation is a concept of such fundamental importance to historical understanding that E.H. Carr in his G.M. Trevelyan lectures (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 to historians. Hayden White attacked the concept of causation as depriving people of both their freedom of action in the present and of control over the future by 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 "Historical time is a recent and highly artificial invention of Western civilization," and the writing of historical narrative based on the concept of time, he has declared, 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 postmodern is paradoxical in that it is contrary to the assertion that there are no time periods in history. And the postmodernist statement that historical time is a thing of the past, itself uses the historical concept of time which the statement is intended to dismiss. 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.
