The Age of Questions

Abstract

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. This book 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? This book presents seven distinct arguments and frameworks for understanding the age. It 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 book illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

Introduction: Charting New Ground in the Study of Ottoman Foreign Relations

“…But since the 'Eastern question' was defined by individual querists in accordance with their desired future, some defined the question/problem as the presence of Muslim Turks in Europe, for others it was Russian expansion, or Poland's right to exist, and for still others it was about the looming Apocalypse and the Second Coming of Christ. 67 The Eastern question (when related to the Ottomans) also served as an inexhaustible source for numerous satirical drawings by European cartoonists, drawings that could index different attitudes: from anti-imperialism and republican dislike of absolute monarchy, to anti-Muslim and anti-Russian sentiments. 68 Most importantly of all, however, is that it gave rise to an enormous multilingual body of literature.…”

“…69 Indeed, Case argues that, 'measured by the sheer magnitude of attention and mania lavished upon it [ … ] the Eastern question was arguably the grandest of all nineteenth-century questions'. 70 Among European scholars at the time, the interest for the Eastern question, Great Power politics and the Ottomans seems to have gradually developed into a field of its own that, as Lucien Frary and Mara Kozelsky suggest, reached maturity with the 1917 publication of J.A.R. Marriot's classic The Eastern Question: An Historical Study in European Diplomacy.…”

An Age of Ages: Nation, Empires and their Discontents

“…posited competing federalist schemes'. 19 Federal projects addressed crises of imperial rule in most European settings. The nature of the federal projects depended on the ideological principles framing each scheme, and on the geopolitical challenges on the ground.…”

“…The vocabulary of biology and medicine heavily influenced the language of problem solving. 41 Nationalists and patriots fought wars, internationalists and pacifists organised peace, humanitarians offered relief and physiologists studied the human body. The Great War became a milestone in the evolution of medical practice.…”