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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Prologue: Questions and Their Predecessors -- Definitions -- The Reality of Questions -- Beyond Begriff -- Questions as Problems -- Ennui and Excess -- Predecessors and Foils of Questions -- Querelle, querist, querulant -- 1 The National Argument: The Imperial to the National Age -- A Word-Making Age -- An Imperial Prehistory of the Age -- International Public Sphere -- Hungary Enters the "Age of Questions" -- What's in a Word? -- Epilogue -- 2 The Progressive Argument: The Age of Emancipation -- A Progressive Age -- Bundling Questions: For Our Freedom and Yours -- Critics of the Age -- The Essence of Questions -- Contradictions and Defects -- A New Man -- Popular Pedagogy -- An Answering Being -- Epilogue -- 3 The Argument about Force: The Loaded Questions of a Genocidal Age -- A Demoralized Age -- The Dark Side of Emancipation -- The Dark Side of Bundling -- The Dark Side of Equilibrium -- Sanctioned Decontamination: The Jewish Question in the Age of Questions -- Hitler as Question Bundler -- Epilogue -- 4 The Federative Argument: The Age of Erasing Borders -- An Aggregating Age -- Formulating Universalism -- Federated Questions: From Indefinite to Definite -- The Federation Consensus -- Epilogue -- 5 The Argument about Farce: The Farcical Age -- A Fraudulent Age -- The Scientization of Questions -- The Wages of Passion -- Epilogue -- 6 The Temporal Argument: The Age of Spin -- A Time-Conscious Age -- Timing -- The American Question Revisited -- Periodicity -- Cathartic Futures -- A Question of Genre: The Constraints Imposed by Timeliness -- Zeitfragen -- Epilogue -- 7 The Suspension-Bridge Argument: The Age of Spanning Contradictions -- A Paradoxical Age -- Automatism -- A Shift in Register -- In Two Places at Once

A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the nineteenth centuryIn the early nineteenth century, a new age began: the age of questions. In the Eastern and Belgian questions, as much as in the slavery, worker, social, woman, and Jewish questions, contemporaries saw not interrogatives to be answered but problems to be solved. Alexis de Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Karl Marx, Frederick Douglass, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and Adolf Hitler were among the many who put their pens to the task. The Age of Questions asks how the question form arose, what trajectory it followed, and why it provoked such feverish excitement for over a century. Was there a family resemblance between questions? Have they disappeared, or are they on the rise again in our time?In this pioneering book, Holly Case undertakes a stunningly original analysis, presenting, chapter by chapter, seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. She considers whether it was marked by a progressive quest for emancipation (of women, slaves, Jews, laborers, and others); a steady, inexorable march toward genocide and the "Final Solution"; or a movement toward federation and the dissolution of boundaries. Or was it simply a farce, a false frenzy dreamed up by publicists eager to sell subscriptions? As the arguments clash, patterns emerge and sharpen until the age reveals its full and peculiar nature.Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.