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

355 Pages·2019·11.466 MB·English

by  Case, Holly

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
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0- 691-13115-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018938059
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Arno Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
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 don’t labor under the illusion that it’s 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.
—Sándor Rőnyi, writing on the
Hungarian question in 1865, (mis)quotes
the foreword to Newton’s Philosophiæ
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
it’s this simultaneity that is so remarkable. The necessary condition
for these questions to appear simultaneously is what constitutes the
riddle!
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s 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. Frančišek 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 xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction 1
Prologue: Questions and Their Predecessors 8
Definitions 9
The Reality of Questions 12
Beyond Begriff 14
Questions as Problems 15
Ennui and Excess 17
Predecessors and Foils of Questions 18
Querelle, querist, querulant 23
1 The National Argument: The Imperial to
the National Age 35
A Word- Making Age 35
An Imperial Prehistory of the Age 36
International Public Sphere 43
Hungary Enters the “Age of Questions” 52
What’s in a Word? 66
Epilogue 69
ix