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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.

The "Transylvanian question" and European statehood -- "Why we fight" -- Homefront as battlefield -- A league of their own -- The "Jewish question" meets the Transylvanian question -- A "new Europe"?

At a time of soul-searching and demoralization in Germany, a revival of the great philosopher of history might provide guidance—but many Germans prefer to avoid thinking about their country's history.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán rails against migration from countries outside of Europe, yet he has been eager to grant citizenship to Hungarian-speakers from countries in the near abroad. Like other populist conservative leaders in the region, he promotes a fortress mentality, based on fear of an "uncertain world," to remake his country—renewing strategies pursued by Hungarian governments in the early twentieth century.

Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, was an Enlightenment philosophe as well as an absolute monarch. His writings, available in a new translation, reveal a complex character and raise questions about government and autocracy in contemporary Europe.

An ambitious attempt to trace the uneven progress toward liberal democracy over several centuries of European history may have drawn the wrong conclusions for dealing with today's illiberals.

In Hungary and Poland, populist leaders with authoritarian tendencies have drawn on the cynical power-holding playbooks of the old communist regimes whose traces they vowed to erase.

White God could be an allegory about Hungary—a proud creature, kicked around and abused, diminished and blamed, that eventually lashes out in fury. Or maybe it's about how Hungary has treated some of its own since the second half of the nineteenth century—assimilating them, but forever suspecting them of betrayal; marginalizing them, persecuting them outright, or even killing them. And so, as in the film, the odd victim leaps up to tear out the jugular of a Hungarian guard in a single snap.

In 1921, John A. Ryan, a priest and professor at Catholic University in Washington, DC, and one of his students, the Reverend Raymond McGowan, publishedA Catechism of the Social Question. The first question in it reads, "What do we mean by the social question?" Answer: "Aquestiondenotes a problem or a difficulty which demands solution. A social question is one that concerns society, or a social group. The social question means certain evils and grievances affecting the wage-earning classes, and calling for removal or remedy."

Abstract
The contribution describes István Deák as both personification and propagator of paradoxical plurals, or seemingly self-contradictory elements concentrated in a single entity. Drawing on examples from his life, scholarship, public-facing writings, and extensive interview material, the authors explore this facet of his career and person.