A groundbreaking history of the Big Questions that dominated the
nineteenth century
In 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.