PREFACE

ζήτημα (Greek for “question”)—“that which is sought” or “a thing not easy to find, of Pentheus’ mutilated limbs” (Euripides, The Bacchae–They succumb to “the dementia and the delirium of a new god”)1

—A GREEK-ENGLISH LEXICON

THIS BOOK WAS BORN of a question I could not answer. At a conference in 2008, I presented material from my first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during World War II. Paul Hanebrink, a great intellect and old friend, asked how the Transylvanian question related to others of the time, like the woman or the worker question. I was at a loss. Although I—like so many others—had written about questions myself,² I had never considered whether there was a family resemblance between the mass of geopolitical, social, economic/material, and scholarly questions that proliferated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What were they? And why were there so many of them? When were they first framed as “questions,” and why did they beg a solution rather than an answer?

So I began to seek out scholars and thinkers who had taken this path before me. With the partial exception of Fyodor Dostoevsky, I found no one who had contemplated questions as an aggregate phenomenon with a history of its own. There are many good reasons why this is the case. One is that scholars who work on a particular historical problem or within a particular region or methodology might only concern themselves with one or two questions. International historians might encounter the Eastern or the Polish, but not the woman or the tuberculosis question. Jewish historians will have thought extensively about the Jewish question. Regional historians will know their regional questions: Kansas, Transylvanian, Macedonian, Irish, et cetera. Marxist historians will know about the social and the worker questions; historians of nationalism about the nationality question; historians of slavery about the (anti-)slavery question, and so on. Occasionally someone will show, as I did in a chapter of my first book and Wendy Brown did much better in an article, the relationship between two questions.3 Rarely someone will wonder when it was that a particular question was formulated as such.⁴

On the whole, however, questions have been treated singly. The result is that historians—myself included—have viewed them very much as our protagonists did: defining them in accordance with our own criteria, assigning origins and a trajectory to them based on those criteria, and occasionally even offering “solutions” to them.

And yet there are many reasons why we may wish to take a broader view, especially in thinking about the extremely long nineteenth century (1770–1970). For one, questions were everywhere. From a spattering of references to the American and the Catholic questions in the mid-to-late eighteenth century, there followed a deluge in the nineteenth century. Thomas Malthus was among the pamphleteers to weigh in on the bullion question of the 1810s, and the Polish question was discussed at the Vienna Congress in 1814–1815, where Napoleonic Europe was dismantled, as were the Turkish and Spanish questions at the subsequent congress in Verona in 1822.⁵ Before long, a full-blown press brawl was underway over the best solutions to the Eastern, Belgian, woman, labour [worker], agrarian, and Jewish questions. These were folded into “larger” ones, like the European, nationality, and social questions, even as they competed for attention with countless “smaller” ones, like the Kansas, Macedonian, Schleswig-Holstein, and cotton questions.⁶

The nineteenth-century drive to settle or solve questions reveals something essential about them: they were construed as problems. The “question” had become an instrument of thought with special potency, structuring ideas about society, politics, and states, and influencing the range of actions considered possible and desirable. This potency is evident in another familiar formulation, one which nineteenth-century commentators arrived at quite early: the “definitive” or “final solution.”

One effect of the Final Solution was that it appeared to break the ubiquity of the question idiom. In the decades that followed World War II, growing awareness of the Holocaust seemed to put an end to the heyday of questions. The formulation itself was presumed tainted. A few questions survived, emerged, or were periodically invoked: the Algerian, German, black, nuclear, gay, Israel-Palestine, and environmental questions, for example; in Turkey one can still speak of a Kurdish question, and even call it “the Eastern question.” But for the most part questions have become the stuff of historical monographs or other forms of retrospective analysis. Nowadays we speak of “resolving issues” or “crises” in the international and domestic political spheres, or engage in scholarly or public “debates” on matters of culture, as opposed to “solving questions.”

Perhaps this is why Vladimir Putin’s reference to the Ukrainian question in 2014 did not arouse much interest: we no longer live in an age of questions.7 And yet the New York Times has recently reported on the “French question”;⁸ the Scottish referendum and Brexit have reintroduced the “English,” “Irish,” and “Catalonian” questions;⁹ and the “migrant (refugee) question” now regularly haunts European headlines.¹⁰ Could it be that we are now on the cusp of another age of questions? If so, we might do well to consider what the first one wrought.

A Quest

The deepest roots of the word for “question” in Latin and Greek both contain the interrogative sense of question, and the question as problem. Yet they also conceal within them another meaning. In Greek ζήτημα also means “that which is sought,” and in Latin, quæro means not only “to ask” but also “to seek”; we find the word quest built into question.11

Writing a history of the age of questions is appropriately a quest. It is a quest to find their origins and burial spots. An honest history of the age must reckon with the unlikelihood of definitively locating either. But sometimes when we go looking for one thing, we come upon something else. In my search for the origins and burial spots of questions, I came to see the structure of nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and political thought very differently. The chapters that follow seek to replicate the myriad ways of seeing that are individually inadequate, but in aggregate indispensable to attaining this curious vantage.

Finally, since a quest to find origins and endings is partly a quest to better fathom the world we inhabit, each chapter poses anew the question of relevance to our time: how forcefully or subtly has the age of questions left its mark on our thinking and our condition? What of that age has disappeared, survived, or transmutated? Is it indeed part of the past, or are we still living in it? My intention is to make evident through historical inquiry something that generally requires a deft literary or artistic sensibility, namely, what Keats called “Negative Capability” (“that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts”), what Thomas Mann called Ästhetizismus (aestheticism), and why the writer Christa Wolf envied painters for their ability to show everything at once.¹² The arguments exist simultaneously, and the tension between them binds them together into a single whole, like the planks of a suspension bridge.