Radical Causal Attentiveness: Clearing the Dust from History's Window

This is a Preprint Abstract Contemporary historiography exhibits a striking tension between unprecedented archival abundance and a persistent reluctance to articulate causal explanation. While modern historical method has successfully restrained speculative excess, it has also encouraged forms of narrative caution that allow descriptive coherence to stand in for causal clarity. The resulting difficulty lies not in the archive itself, but in how historical materials are read. This article introduces Radical Causal Attentiveness (RCA) as a clarifying lens for historical reading rather than a theory or methodological alternative. RCA directs attention to the material and structural conditions presupposed by historical traces, emphasizing minimal causal anchors—such as bodily capacity, environmental constraint, resource availability, and institutional organization—that delimit historical possibility without determining outcomes. Developed through the practices of anchoring necessary conditions, tracing enabling configurations, and clearing narrative of unexamined assumptions, RCA aims to restore causal legibility while preserving narrative plurality and evidentiary restraint. Through illustrative discussions of mobility, archival silence, and ethical transformation, the article demonstrates how historical explanation can regain proportion without reverting to naïve positivism or dissolving into relativism. Rather than proposing a new explanatory framework, the article positions RCA as a form of reading hygiene: a disciplined attentiveness that aligns narrative interpretation with material constraint. In doing so, it offers a modest but durable contribution to the philosophy of history by clarifying how causal understanding may responsibly operate within contemporary historiographical practice.