Holly Case - The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions Over the Nineteenth Century,

THE AGE OF QUESTIONS

The Age of Questions

OR, A FIRST ATTEMPT AT AN AGGREGATE HISTORY OF THE EASTERN, SOCIAL, WOMAN, AMERICAN, JEWISH, POLISH, BULLION, TUBERCULOSIS, AND MANY OTHER QUESTIONS OVER THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, AND BEYOND

HOLLY CASE

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright 2018 by Princeton University Press

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ISBN 978-0-691-13115-3

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For the sui generis:
Itsie, Gene, and Sis
And for Tenure,
sine qua non

We dont labor under the illusion that its possible to express everything at once, for truly not everything can be made sense of in a word. But with a little patience and attention, everything that can be known, even the most difficult mathematical questions, can be simplified and solved.

SNDOR RNYI, WRITING ON THE HUNGARIAN QUESTION IN 1865, (MIS)QUOTES THE FOREWORD TO NEWTONS PHILOSOPHI NATURALIS PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA

Why does one question impinge upon the other? Why does one evoke the other when there is no obvious connection between them? [A]ll the most important questions of Europe and humankind in our day are forever being raised simultaneously. And its this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the riddle!

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, A WRITERS DIARY (1877)

Countless questions are on the agenda nowadays. [W]e speak and write so much about questions, like the social or societal question, the woman question, the suffrage question, the Eastern question, the currency question, and also the religious question. Why?

SLOVENE THEOLOGIAN DR. FRANIEK LAMPE IN AN ARTICLE TITLED QUESTION UPON QUESTION! (1895)

[O]ne was always endeavoring to find the solution to the question, rather than accepting that many questioners will have many answers, that a philosophical question is merely a thinly veiled desire to receive a particular answer that is already implied in the question itself.

OSWALD SPENGLER, THE DECLINE OF THE WEST: FORM AND ACTUALITY (1918)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

(Greek for question)that which is sought or a thing not easy to find, of Pentheus mutilated limbs (Euripides, The BacchaeThey succumb to the dementia and the delirium of a new god)

A GREEK-ENGLISH LEXICON

THIS BOOK WAS BORN of a question I could not answer. At a conference in 2008, I presented material from my first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II. Paul Hanebrink, a great intellect and old friend, asked how the Transylvanian question related to others of the time, like the woman or the worker question. I was at a loss. Although Ilike so many othershad written about questions myself, I had never considered whether there was a family resemblance between the mass of geopolitical, social, economic/material, and scholarly questions that proliferated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What were they? And why were there so many of them? When were they first framed as questions, and why did they beg a solution rather than an answer?

So I began to seek out scholars and thinkers who had taken this path before me. With the partial exception of Fyodor Dostoevsky, I found no one who had contemplated questions as an aggregate phenomenon with a history of its own. There are many good reasons why this is the case. One is that scholars who work on a particular historical problem or within a particular region or methodology might only concern themselves with one or two questions. International historians might encounter the Eastern or the Polish,

On the whole, however, questions have been treated singly. The result is that historiansmyself includedhave viewed them very much as our protagonists did: defining them in accordance with our own criteria, assigning origins and a trajectory to them based on those criteria, and occasionally even offering solutions to them.

And yet there are many reasons why we may wish to take a broader view, especially in thinking about the extremely long nineteenth century (17701970). For one, questions were everywhere. From a spattering of references to the American and the Catholic questions in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, there followed a deluge in the nineteenth century. Thomas Malthus was among the pamphleteers to weigh in on the bullion question of the 1810s, and the Polish question was discussed at the Vienna Congress in 18141815, where Napoleonic Europe was dismantled, as were the Turkish and Spanish questions at the subsequent congress in Verona in 1822.

The nineteenth-century drive to settle or solve questions reveals something essential about them: they were construed as problems. The question had become an instrument of thought with special potency, structuring ideas about society, politics, and states, and influencing the range of actions considered possible and desirable. This potency is evident in another familiar formulation, one which nineteenth-century commentators arrived at quite early: the definitive or final solution.

One effect of the Final Solution was that it appeared to break the ubiquity of the question idiom. In the decades that followed World War II, growing awareness of the Holocaust seemed to put an end to the heyday of questions. The formulation itself was presumed tainted. A few questions survived, emerged, or were periodically invoked: the Algerian, German, black, nuclear, gay, Israel-Palestine, and environmental questions, for example; in Turkey one can still speak of a Kurdish question, and even call it the Eastern question. But for the most part questions have become the stuff of historical monographs or other forms of retrospective analysis. Nowadays we speak of resolving issues or crises in the international and domestic political spheres, or engage in scholarly or public debates on matters of culture, as opposed to solving questions.

Perhaps this is why Vladimir Putins reference to the Ukrainian question in 2014 did not arouse much interest: we no longer live in an age of questions. Could it be that we are now on the cusp of another age of questions? If so, we might do well to consider what the first one wrought.

A Quest

The deepest roots of the word for question in Latin and Greek both contain the interrogative sense of question, and the question as problem. Yet they also conceal within them another meaning.

Writing a history of the age of questions is appropriately a quest. It is a quest to find their origins and burial spots. An honest history of the age must reckon with the unlikelihood of definitively locating either. But sometimes when we go looking for one thing, we come upon something else. In my search for the origins and burial spots of questions, I came to see the structure of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and political thought very differently. The chapters that follow seek to replicate the myriad ways of seeing that are individually inadequate, but in aggregate indispensable to attaining this curious vantage.

Finally, since a quest to find origins and endings is partly a quest to better fathom the world we inhabit, each chapter poses anew the question of relevance to our time: how forcefully or subtly has the age of questions left its mark on our thinking and our condition? What of that age has disappeared, survived, or transmutated? Is it indeed part of the past, or are we still living in it? My intention is to make evident through historical inquiry something that generally requires a deft literary or artistic sensibility, namely, what Keats called Negative Capability (that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts), what Thomas Mann called