2

The Progressive Argument

THE AGE OF EMANCIPATION

[T]he question of emancipation is the question of our time.1

—GERMAN THEOLOGIAN BRUNO BAUER IN AN ESSAY ON THE JEWISH QUESTION (1842)

A Progressive Age

If there was a word that ruled the age of questions, it was emancipation. It was the implied solution to most of the great questions: the Jewish, slavery, and woman as much as the Greek, Serbian, Polish, Irish, and Macedonian questions. States, peoples, and individuals all demanded it in equal measure. In his 1842 essay on the Jewish question, Bruno Bauer wrote, “[T]he question of emancipation is the question of our time.”² Why else would the British statesman and Whig Henry Brougham, advocate and advisor on the Polish question, skip a meeting in 1839 of the London Literary Association of the Friends of Poland to attend to the slavery question?³ Why else would Adam Mickiewicz, who had himself weighed in numerous times on the Polish question, engage in a deep friendship and prolific correspondence with Margaret Fuller, the American journalist and outspoken advocate for both women’s and slaves’ emancipation?⁴

The factors that gave rise to the age of questions can be found in the conditions of the late eighteenth century, during which power relations were shifting at both the societal and the international levels. Hitherto marginal classes and nations were gaining a voice and a presence in both domestic and international politics. The growing strength of Russia in the East and of the middle class in Western Europe, especially France, introduced a moralizing tone into international and domestic politics that was recognizable already in the 1770s but did not find its expression until half a century later, in the 1810s and 1820s, when the “question” became the byword of moral necessity. These two dimensions of the age of questions—the geopolitical and the social—came into their own roughly simultaneously and asserted themselves in similar terms, in the name of liberty, justice, and equality. The age of questions was thus saturated at its origin with progressive ideals, such that even conflicts among social groups and nations hinged on the opposing sides’ relative capacity to represent those ideals.5

Rationalization was an additional feature of this fundamentally progressive age. At the commodities level, the sugar, cotton, and oyster questions were about equilibrium: between consumption and production, tariffs and bounties, conservation and exploitation.⁶ Many discussions of the cotton question were also about slavery and written by abolitionists.⁷ Medical and professional questions relating to diseases such as tuberculosis and cholera, lighting systems, waterways, apartment buildings, and sewage systems posited the necessity of enhancing expertise and precision and producing marked and measurable improvements in people’s lives.⁸ Meanwhile academic and literary questions served as means of enforcing scholarly rigor and intellectual integrity.⁹ A surprising amount of ink was spilled over the so-called dentist question, which one pamphlet defined as the question of the “practice of dentistry itself” and its regulation by law.¹⁰ In sum, questions pointed the way forward to a more just, healthy, discerning, efficient, and knowledgeable society, culture, and international system.

That over the first half of the nineteenth century “the x question” came to be the framing of choice for progressive interventions as much in the geopolitical as in the social realm is evident from Adam Czartoryski’s Essay on Diplomacy written in 1823 and published in two editions; one in 1830, with the outbreak of the (ultimately unsuccessful) Polish November Uprising against tsarist Russia, and another in 1864, during the (also ultimately unsuccessful) January Uprising against tsarist Russia.11 Czartoryski was a Polish nobleman and statesman, as well as a close friend and advisor to the Russian tsar Alexander I, who had served as the minister of foreign affairs in the Russian Empire from 1804 to 1806. He would later serve as the president of the Polish National Government during the November Uprising (1830–1831) before it was put down by tsarist forces.¹²

During his tenure as Russia’s foreign minister, Czartoryski drafted a ministerial act proposing the total reorganization of the boundaries of Europe, including the creation of an independent Poland under Russian protection. The Essay contains many similar ideas for a complete overhaul of the international system, down to the very principles upon which diplomacy is based. It is organized in sections on how diplomacy actually is—namely, chaotic, unjust, and violent—versus how it should be, namely, rational, just, and peaceful.¹³ Whereas the diplomatic spirit of the time was characterized by “greed, distrust and envy,” Czartoryski argued, it could, if profound reforms were to be initiated by the European cabinets, become “the noblest science and the most useful study.”¹⁴ Czartoryski believed that states were effectively “masses of personified individuals” and therefore subject to natural law and entitled to the same forms of liberty and equality as individuals.¹⁵

The structure of the two editions of the Essay is largely identical, but the content of some sections is radically different. Above all, in the earlier edition, “questions” do not appear, whereas in the 1864 version, there are several explicit mentions of the Polish question, including the assertion that there will be no security in Europe until the great iniquity perpetrated against the Poles is re-paired.16 The second edition also contains a reference to the Polish question, retrospectively tying it to the “Negro question” in a segment on the Congress of Vienna.¹⁷ The publication history of Czartoryski’s Essay illustrates the extent to which questions became the shorthand of choice for progressive thinkers.

Bundling Questions: For Our Freedom and Yours

Just as Czartoryski linked the Polish to the Negro question, the emancipatory impulse of the age bundled its causes. “For our freedom and yours” (Za naszą i waszą wolnosc) ran the Polish revolutionary slogan of 1831. Querists cast the Belgian question as related to the Polish question during the overlapping upheavals in would-be Poland and Belgium, not least of all because the internationally agreed-upon solution to the Belgian question had been independence, a solution that many querists favored for Poland, as well. “[T]he Polish question is identical with that of Belgium,” declared the French royalist newspaper Le Messager des Chambres, on December 11, 1830.¹⁸ “Shall we have war or peace?” wrote the Parisian correspondent of the London Standard in late January of 1831. “People think about nothing else, and talk about nothing else than this. First of all they are looking to the Belgian question … and next to the Polish question. They do not, however, forget that there is still outstanding the Greek question.”¹⁹ Thus began the agglomeration of questions into emancipatory bundles.

“ ‘Do you love freedom?’ is the question we have startled our age withal; and we have begun to judge men—of all classes and conditions,—by the reply their lives make to it,” wrote Maria Weston Chapman in 1839 in Right and Wrong in Massachusetts, in which she commented on the relationship between the slavery and woman questions:

“May the numerous unpopular questions with which the anti-slavery cause is connected” (thus ran our prayer) “continually come up with it as it is borne onward. So that up to the final triumph, the act of joining an anti-slavery association may be, as it has hitherto proved,—a test act.” And so we pray still; for still and forever, TRUTH is one and indivisible. All moral questions are by their nature inseparable, in any other than a mechanical sense, and while we sedulously keep them thus mechanically separate, because to do otherwise would be a sin against the freedom of others, and a betrayal of their confidence, we feel it to be no less a sin against freedom for others to impede any man’s course with reproach, on account of this eternal decree of God’s providence.20

Aggregation also offered the possibility of a universal solution. “Bourgeois society has never been so united as it is united today in the cause of national freedom and independence,” wrote the Serbian scholar and statesman Vladimir Jovanovic in a pamphlet on the Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question in 1863. “It creates bonds not merely between individual people, but between nations, confirmed in that which is called the spirit of the time.” He then listed all of the places that had become “questions”—Italy, Greece (“and other Eastern countries”), Poland, Schleswig-Holstein—and that were now locked in a relationship of mutual aspiration that bound their respective questions to a shared solution.²¹

At the same time, during the Polish January Uprising in 1863–1864, other pairings emerged, as querists discussed the Polish question together with the Italian, Mexican, and ever-present Eastern questions, and all the national liberationist undertones the comparison implied. The French historian and publicist Comte de Montalembert wrote in 1863, for example, that “the Eastern question, the Italian question, and the Mexican question cannot permit us to take refuge in indifference and impotence in the face of the Polish question. All of these three issues, despite their extreme gravity, were much less severe and did not take hold of the French heart as much the Polish question.”22

Just over a decade later, William Gladstone, the British liberal statesman and outspoken advocate of self-government for Slavs in the Ottoman Empire, criticized “one of the latest artifices,” which in his view was “to separate the question of Servia from the question of Herzegovina and Bosnia and of Bulgaria … they had one root; they must surely have one remedy, I mean morally one; and administered by the same handling; for, if one part of the question be placed in relief, and one in shadow, the light will not fall on the dark places, and guilt will gain impunity.”²³

Critics of the Age

The progressive essence of nineteenth-century question mania is further evident from the commentary of the period’s conservative critics. In 1834, in a book by the German Mennonite preacher Leonhard Weydmann on The Questions of Our Tumultuous Time, the author noted that querists were intent on destroying the existing hierarchy and setting up in its place “forms whereby the distinction between governing and being governed well-nigh disappears.”²⁴ Conservatives also saw the age of questions as excessively humane. Thomas Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” appeared in Eraser’s Magazine in December 1849. He accused the “Philanthropists” of the age of being “Sunk in deep froth-oceans of ‘Benevolence,’ ‘Fraternity,’ ‘Emancipation-principle,’ ‘Christian Philanthropy,’ and other most amiable-looking but most baseless, and in the end baleful and all-bewildering jargon,—sad product of a skeptical Eighteenth Century, and of poor human hearts left destitute of any earnest guidance, and disbelieving that there ever was any.”²⁵

The liberal thinker John Stuart Mill responded to Carlyle’s charge in a letter to the editor of Eraser’s. Mill’s letter, “The Negro Question,” appeared in January 1850 and included his own assessment of the spirit of the age:

Let me say a few words on the general quarrel of your contributor with the present age.… Your contributor thinks that the age has too much humanity, is too anxious to abolish pain. I affirm, on the contrary, that it has too little humanity … It is not by excess of a good quality that the age is in fault, but by deficiency—deficiency even of philanthropy, and still more of other qualities wherewith to balance and direct what philanthropy it has.26

This disparity of perception resulted in not a little friction between querists and conservatives, but it bears emphasizing that the language of questions was the terrain of progressives and liberal reformers in that it was they who assumed something was wrong with the status quo that needed fixing. They might have disagreed over the means—as the liberal Italian statesman Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, and the revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini did over whether liberal reform or national revolution was at the base of the Italian question²⁷—but no querist could hold with the status quo.

Most importantly, progressive querists’ insistence that period questions were genuine problems demanding expedient solutions started to acquire the authority of consensus, such that in 1941, even Adolf Hitler declared the social question a matter of first-order importance for Nazi Germany, comparing it to the abolition of serfdom: “The decisive matter, I said to myself, is the social question. To evade the question was like in the seventeenth or eighteenth century to believe that it was unnecessary to abolish serfdom,” he said.²⁸

The Essence of Questions

The Polish, Armenian, woman, Jewish, worker, agrarian, Greek, slavery, and countless other questions were about freedom and independence—for Poles, Armenians, women, Jews, and others. The social, Eastern, nationalities, and European questions were aggregates that encompassed a variety of the aforementioned “smaller” emancipatory questions. The Congress of Vienna placed many of them literally on the table for discussion.29 Some early references to a “Polish question,” for example, appear in correspondence between participants in the 1815 Congress of Vienna and in the documents relating to the proceedings.³⁰ Their authors were concerned with whether Poland had the right to exist as an independent state following the eighteenth-century partitions that had wiped it off the map of Europe and contributed to the considerable westward expansion of tsarist Russia and the eastward and northward expansion of the Prussian and Habsburg Empires. The South American question (sometimes called the Spanish-American question³¹) that emerged in the 1810s around independence movements in South America during and after the Napoleonic Wars provides another early example.³²

But the real flood of questions into the world of pamphlets, publicists, and public opinion began in the 1820s. The West India question, which was mentioned in the London Times with considerable frequency starting in late 1823 and often discussed in connection with the emergent “(anti-)slave(ry) question,” is revealing of the emancipatory momentum behind questioneering.³³ A pamphlet by T. S. Winn from 1825 showcased the progressive character of querists: “[T]he Parliament of Great Britain took so many years to debate on the expediency of an Abolition of our Slave Trade with Africa, the Emancipation of Ireland, the Abolition of Slavery throughout our dominions, and other equally important questions of such self-evident solution.”³⁴ On the West India question, Winn continued, “[H]is Lordship [Earl Bathurst, British colonial secretary] is usually enlightened, liberal, and patriotic enough in his general line of politicks—but possessing West India estate, see his speeches in the parliamentary debates on the Slave question.—Oh what a falling off is there.”³⁵

In discussions of the West India question of the 1820s, then, social and geopolitical emancipation were offered as “self-evident” or natural solutions. The 1830s mark the full onset of the age, for though the coming of questions was presaged in the decades prior, their explosion around 1829 and 1830 was truly remarkable.36 Within a few months numerous questions burst onto the scene: the Belgian, Eastern, Polish, Jewish, and Algerian questions all made their broad-circulation debuts in that decade.³⁷ By the end of the 1830s, the woman and the labor questions were also appearing in pamphlets, parliamentary proceedings, and press venues.

This simultaneity is rooted in the convergence of three factors, all of them related to the emancipationist agenda of querists: the expansion and politicization of press distribution, the expansion of the voting franchise (in Britain), and a tight series of international upheavals around struggles for rights. In the words of British press historian Ivon Asquith, “Perhaps the most important aspect of the history of the press in this period is the decline in the ability of governments to control it.”³⁸ Although up until 1836, the British periodical press was subject to a significant stamp tax, many “unstamped papers” reached readers. The bulk of these were liberal-revolutionary. Compared to the legally stamped press, one historian has observed, unstamped papers were more “consummately impudent” and “self-consciously subversive.”³⁹ These periodicals left their mark on the age of questions from its early years.

Events also played a significant role, including the Greek uprising in the Ottoman Empire (1821–1832), that ultimately resulted in the independence of Greece; the Polish November Uprising in tsarist Russia (1830–1831), crushed by tsarist troops; the Belgian Revolution (1830–1839), resulting in Belgium’s independence; the July Revolution (1830) and the June rebellion (1832) which codified popular sovereignty in France; and the debates in the British parliament around the Roman Catholic Relief Act (1829), the Bill for Removal of Jewish Disabilities (1830), and the Reform Act for the expansion of the voting franchise (1832).⁴⁰

Many of these events were causes célèbres of progressives in Britain and France, but it was perhaps the Greek revolt that figured most heavily in cementing the emancipationist character of the age. It inspired liberal romantics across Europe, and the Western Great Powers’ ultimate, albeit reluctant, sanctioning of Greek independence gave reformers a foothold back home.41 The revolt also contributed to the rise of what Alexis de Tocqueville called “la grande affaire du siècle”—the Eastern question, among the most significant and persistent of questions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴²

Contradictions and Defects

A question came into being where conditions begged expeditious redress; where something was wrong and badly needed fixing. It is in this aspect that the sensibility of the age was expressed in its purest form: an acute sense of imbalance, disparity, disequilibrium. The history of the social question provides a signature example. A remarkable degree of consensus formed around what had given rise to it: a tension or contradiction between the spirit of the time and the conditions of the time. In the words of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from his lectures on the philosophy of history in the 1820s, “nothing is more common today than the complaint that the ideals raised by fantasy are not being realized, that these glorious dreams are being destroyed by cold actuality.”⁴³

In a book on the “social question” published in 1871, the German economist and statistician Hans von Scheel wrote that the “modern culture state” placed “the equality of all before the law and the freedom of the individual … as fundamental conditions of the spiritual and material development of the people.”⁴⁴ But because there was a “double organization of the population within the state: a political and an economic,” the principle of freedom and equality was unevenly applied across the political and economic realms, producing a contradiction “unique to modern society.” “[O]ut of legal freedom and equality there emerged economic un-freedom and inequality.” This in turn, von Scheel believed, gave rise to the “social question”:

[E]very contradiction, as soon as it becomes conscious, becomes a thought problem: a question. And in this way the formulation of the social question of the present time reveals itself to us very simply and specifically: it is the contradiction between national economic development and the societal development principle—which appears to us as an ideal—of freedom and equality. The study and solution of this contradiction is the study and solution of the contemporary social question.45

In 1892, Edmondo de Amicis defined the social question as the tension between the “principle of equality” and the fact of inequality.⁴⁶ Two years later, Gustav Müller, a self-declared “common man of the people,” wrote that the “social question” was “a consequence of the sharpened capacity to grasp the stark defects [Mißstände] of the present which impose an incontrovertible certainty that conditions as they are today cannot continue to exist for all eternity.”⁴⁷ Writing in 1895, the German Jesuit canon law scholar and sociologist Joseph Biederlack emphasized that the social question stemmed from “economic and social defects” resulting from the contemporary “one-sided development of money capitalism.”⁴⁸ And shortly thereafter, Ludwig Stein, a Hungarian-Jewish rabbi, sociologist and philosopher, saw an irreconcilable contradiction between the ideals of freedom and equality at the root of the “social question.”⁴⁹

A New Man

The tension between idea and practice—and attempts to reconcile the two—was central to the way the “social question” was discussed in the nineteenth century. To achieve this reconciliation, a number of querists dreamt of common social action that would bring idea and practice into longed-for harmony.⁵⁰ As Czartoryski had proposed the remaking of the international system from the ground up, lending it a moral thrust, so too did commentators on the social question posit the necessity of fundamental reform, beginning with the very person, à la Rousseau.51 Only within the person could the contradictions of the time find a common frame and thus a resolution.

In an 1863 essay on William Shakespeare, the French progressive novelist Victor Hugo wrote, “At the point where the social question has arrived, everything should be joint action. Isolated forces cancel, the ideal and the real are integral. Art should help science. Both wheels of progress are turning together.”⁵² To that end, Hugo intoned the bankruptcy of a strictly economic approach to the “social question,” arguing that economics had too long ruled the debate. “The social question was too reduced to the economic point of view, it is time to go back to the moral point of view…. Start with: extensive public education [for] if the intellectual condition improves, the material condition will also improve. Rest assured, if your soul grows, your bread also whitens.”⁵³

In other words, it was not enough to create a new system, one had to create a new kind of person, a moral person comparable to the moral geopolitical order conceived by Czartoryski. “The most potent fact of experience now is that the new times require new men, and that the men cannot be furnished fast enough to meet the demand,”⁵⁴ wrote the American Unitarian reverend and publicist George Batchelor in a book on Social Equilibrium in 1887. Batchelor called for “the training of society to a finer loyalty to the higher interests of humanity.”⁵⁵

Nor was it only the social question for which this solution was proposed. In Britain, education itself had long since become a question. In an 1854 pamphlet on the “education question,” Reverand George Jamieson of Aberdeen wrote that “man is according as he has been educated,” and therefore “the best possible education” should be brought “within the reach of the meanest, as well as the greatest.”⁵⁶ “In our view,” wrote the French poet and publicist Léon Deschamps in 1891, “the colonial question has been reduced to an education question.”⁵⁷

“In France,” wrote Henri de Tourville in 1896 in the preface to a book on The Labour Question in Britain, “the education of all the classes is radically and appallingly wrong … This is essentially the source … of the whole Social Question.… A great enterprise has grown up, but there is something wrong with its working. After blaming all the forces of nature, and after appealing to all of them, it has at last been realized that what is wanting is the man.” He proposed altering the education of youths to turn out a type of man like the Anglo-Saxon “splendid savage.”58 In 1912, a Hungarian writing on The Essence of the Social Question reiterated the argument, citing Tolstoy as saying that in order for society to change, the human heart must change.⁵⁹ “Legal and economic remedies would not of themselves solve the social question,” wrote Ryan and McGowan in their 1921 Catechism of the Social Question. “They are of considerable value, but there must also be a change in the spirit and ideals of men and women.”⁶⁰

Popular Pedagogy

Educating the public—creating society—was not merely considered to be the form that a solution to the social question should take; it was also the form that discussions of the social question themselves took. To that end, a new didactic genre was developed, one that had a precedent in the earliest treatments of the bullion question, wherein commentators stressed the necessity of exposing the matter to public opinion and wondered about the timing and the form of their interventions (parliamentary debate being considered necessary but insufficient).⁶¹ In line with the tendency to at once engage, educate, and convince a reading public on certain questions, a popular pedagogical literature began to emerge, descended from the almanac, the catechism, and the pamphlet, but with shades of the university lecture hall also present.

And yet, initially at least, the university lecture hall was the direct adversary of those seeking to raise the profile of the social question. An early reference to the social question appeared in 1831 in the French Encyclopédie Moderne under the entry for “Université.” The distinction between scholastic versus practical questions discussed by Southey and Malthus can be found here in a critique of the university, where scholastic questions had been born and from whence they were propagated. “Real education, of the sort that created men, that shaped events, no longer has anything in common with this newly restored frame that is still called ‘University,’ ” the authors of the Encyclopédie argued. “Intelligence grows through other channels; the developments that moral science has undergone [h]ad the main effect to appreciate the need that mankind has for work. This new knowledge puts the social question where it should be, that is to say, in the position of the highest foresight or the highest theory, the only universal.”62 Here again, the scholastic tradition (of the universities) was supplanted by a new, more practical sensibility in the form of the social question.

When the next surge of revolutionary activity began in 1848, its leadership declared that a new kind of universal knowledge was required to solve the social question. In a speech delivered by Adolphe Thiers to the French National Assembly on September 13, 1848, he spoke of it as “a vital question for the future of the republic,” one that was not a question of political economy or customs duties or economics but rather “a societal [gesellschaftliche], political philosophical, metaphysical question; a question that encompasses all these relationships within itself.” As Amicis would later do, Thiers warned his audience that the acuteness of the question was undeniable: “and you know,” he continued, “what an enormous significance the social question has attained in the events that have moved France and the world.”⁶³

In Thiers’s speech, as in Hugo’s, we find a rejection of political economy in favor of a more all-encompassing mode of understanding and addressing the “social question,” one informed by empiricism as much as by idealism. For many who followed the interventions of Thiers and the socialist Louis Blanc in the French National Assembly during the 1848 revolutions, this meant socialism. “Socialism,” the German translator of their speeches declared in early 1849, “is a science whose propositions [Sätze] were not invented in an academic’s study, nor can they be proven by logic quibbles or erudite citations. It is a science that grows directly from the life of the people and can only develop and refine itself in real daily interaction with the world.”64

But insofar as these thinkers were critical of the out-of-touch nature of university training and demanded a more universal and practical form of education, they also sought to change the university’s intended audience, and therewith the language and genres in which it addressed itself to that audience. In a series of lectures, published in Germany in 1856, meant for the general education of women, for example, Karl Biedermann included a lecture on “The Social Question, Its Meaning, and Attempts to Solve It.”⁶⁵ No one, a range of authors intoned, could afford to ignore the “social question.” In the words of von Scheel writing in 1871, “it is the duty of every educated person to inform themselves on the nature of the social question or at least to orient themselves with respect to it.”⁶⁶ Driven by the same imperative, numerous works on the social question assumed a popular didactic tone, variously seeking to imitate and to transform the university.

The university lecture hall thus became a base of operations for querists. Recall that Amicis delivered his lecture on the social question to students at the university in Turin in 1892. Within months it was translated into Italian, German, Spanish, Czech, and French, and over the course of the next decade, into Bulgarian, Polish, and Russian, as well.⁶⁷ In 1895, Joseph Biederlack compiled a series of lectures he had given at the theological seminary in Innsbruck under the title The Social Question: A Contribution to Orientation Regarding Its Essence and Solution. Originally, the lectures were intended to prepare future priests for confronting “the great problem of our time,” but the book was so popular it went into several editions and was still being published after the Great War.⁶⁸ As for McGowan and Ryan’s 1921 Catechism of the Social Question, the didactic nature is inherent to the form. In the opening remarks on “How Best to Use the Catechism,” the authors recommended that “groups of people study it together.”69

Within the popular pedagogical genre, querists also sought to determine what counted as a venue or means of solving questions and who the primary agents of the solution could and should be. J. A. Hobson wrote The Social Problem in 1901, in which he noted that the science of “current political economy” was “defective” for the purpose “of handling the Social Question.” The proper method, he determined, “must be that of an organic science, reorganizing organic interaction and qualitative differences, not the purely mathematical or quantitative method which current economic science tends more and more to employ.”⁷⁰

Hobson and others worked to shift the scientific metaphor underpinning questions from mathematics/economics to biology. With this shift came a devaluation of day-to-day political “solutions” to the social question. Instead, a longer, broader view was required.

Turning to concrete politics, [t]he problem drives back into the region of individual character and motive…. The ultimate good working of … a democracy will depend upon the intelligence and goodwill which the private citizens bring to bear upon public life, and upon the existence of corresponding qualities and sentiments in the public servants … The forms and institutions of a State and a society should be so shaped and so sized as to render this free and effective play of moral and intellectual forces possible.

Hobson wrote of the “form” that the solution should take, rather than its particular content, namely, education.

The Social Question finds, perhaps, its clearest unity in that common education of the intelligence and goodwill of the citizen which, by enlarging the area and extending the time-range of social utility for all citizens alike, tends to assimilate their private valuations, and so give increased definiteness, coherence and strength to the public standard and the public policy. An organic social policy will be strong precisely in proportion as it expresses the enlightened and enlarged common sense and common feeling of the many … Society as an organism must be animated by a common moral and intellectual life, vested in individuals who are working in conscious cooperation for a common end, if any substantial progressive economy of social life is to be attained.71

It was everyone’s duty to understand and participate in the queristic enterprise, and the progressive spirit saw in each individual a solution.

An Answering Being

The German poet and journalist Heinrich Heine was famously excited by questions. Some claim it was he who introduced the “social question” into the German language in his Paris Correspondence,⁷² and it was undeniably he who scorned the ubiquity of the Eastern question in 1841,⁷³ and who just over a decade later authored “Zum Lazarus,” a poem which coined the phrase “verdammte Fragen” (damned questions).⁷⁴

Laß die heilgen Parabolen,

Laß die frommen Hypothesen—

Suche die verdammten Fragen

Ohne Umschweif uns zu lösen.

Warum schleppt sich blutend, elend,

Unter Kreuzlast der Gerechte,

Leave the holy parabolas,

Leave the pious hypotheses—

Seek to solve the damned questions,

For us, without wavering.

Why does the just man go bleeding, miserable,

Burdened by the heavy cross,

Während glücklich als ein Sieger

Trabt auf hohem Roß der Schlechte?

Woran liegt die Schuld? Ist etwa

Unser Herr nicht ganz allmächtig?

Oder treibt er selbst den Unfug?

Ach, das wäre niederträchtig.

Also fragen wir beständig,

Bis man uns mit einer Handvoll

Erde endlich stopft die Mäuler—

Aber ist das eine Antwort?75

While, happy as a conqueror,

The unjust man sits on a high horse?

Wherein lies the blame? Is maybe

Our Lord not so almighty?

Or is He Himself behind this mischief?

Oh, that would be vile.

So we keep asking

Until someone finally stuffs our mouths

With a handful of dirt—

But is that an answer?

“Zum Lazarus” was translated into Russian in 1858, and Russia’s own “proklyatye voprosy” (accursed questions) were born, the most prominent of which was the biblical “What shall we do then?” (Luke 3:10); or “What is to be done?” As Isaiah Berlin would later show, the “accursed questions” became the basis for a number of seminal works by the revolutionary and reform movements and a constant preoccupation of Russian literature and politics throughout the second half of the twentieth century, from Nikolai Chernyshevsky to Tolstoy to Lenin, all of whom wrote works with the title What Is to Be Done?⁷⁶

The “accursed questions” are a poor fit for the age of questions in one respect: they were actually questions, which is to say interrogatives.⁷⁷ They nonetheless deserve a place here because of the relation they bear to the practical and progressive urge behind addressing the “problem complexes” of the time. It is no coincidence, for example, that Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? was preoccupied with the idea of the “new man.”78 To further trace this relation we must make a foray into the realm of philosophy, specifically ontology, or the philosophical line of inquiry concerned with the nature of being. This was a field that consumed the Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács toward the end of his life as he wrote the massive, multivolume Ontology of Social Being, published in 1972, a year after his death. In it, Lukács wrote that the question forever to be decided was: “What is to be done?”⁷⁹

“We’ve often said that Man is an answering being [antwortendes Wesen],” Lukács wrote, all practical activity has a goal. Furthermore, insofar as humans “give answer” to their condition, they show how the course of history contains within it the potential to change course toward a new goal.⁸⁰ The individual however faces a “horrible endlessness of isolated individual questions” and tries to bring them together into “a few central” ones, a selection that is at once a “tendency to generalization.”⁸¹ This process brings revolutionary transformation, which in turn creates new forms, such that the period before the transformation cannot be reconstructed; the words carry a different meaning, the people themselves are transformed. Thus, “[t]he concisely stated central questions lend the ‘answering being’ a thrust into world-formation and thereby indirectly into self-formation.”⁸² A “solution” at the level of society does not emerge automatically from conditions but exists solely as a possibility in which practical activity (praxis) can play a role.⁸³

The footprints of the age of questions are all over Lukács’s Ontology: in the slippage between “question” and “problem complexes” [Fragenkomplexe]; the difficulty of arriving at a workable “solution”; the aggregative or bundling tendency surrounding questions; the emphasis on “practical activity”; the potential for “revolutionary transformation” at the level of the person as much as of the world; and all by means of “concisely stated central questions.” The idea that to concisely state a question was transformative in itself is reminiscent of Marx’s 1843 response to an article on the Jewish question by the German theologian Bruno Bauer. Marx wrote that “[t]he formulation of a question is its solution.”84 And in Lukács’s “answering being,” there is another echo of Marx, who wrote in his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that humanity only sets itself tasks that it can solve and that tasks only emerge when the conditions for their solution are already in evidence or at least in a “process of becoming.”⁸⁵

Although it was above all ideology Lukács sought to understand, he may have inadvertently written a philosophy for the age of questions. Lukács’s Ontology is at once a summation of and a retrospective on the age and its visions of a moral transformation of the world, as much as of the person.

The Genre of the Deed

The emergence and proliferation of popular didactic texts—with their emphasis on the whole of society and the practical over the heady and theoretical—hint at the existence of another genre that arose from the age of questions: the genre of the deed. It would be a mistake to neglect nonverbal and nontextual contributions to the age of questions, especially in an era that was keen to emphasize “practical activity.” “A satisfactory answer [to the social question],” wrote J. A. Hobson in 1901, “cannot consist in the theoretic solution of a problem; it must lie in the region of social conduct. Not merely the saying what should be done, but the doing, is the solution. The reins of Science and Practice are drawn together; a theory of social conduct which shall take cognizance of all the factors will be likewise the art of social conduct.”⁸⁶

Here the response of a Hungarian zoologist, Ferenc Tangl, to a request to weigh in on the Jewish question for a Hungarian cultural journal warrants mention. It was exceptionally brief:

I’m after all just a creature of the laboratory who twenty-five years ago only took a position on the matter in question—which remains unchanged to the present day—insofar as I banished the Jewish question from my institutes! I don’t concern myself with the matter of whether the honest person I choose as a colleague is a Christian or a Jew, and I’ve truly had no cause to complain that the majority of my colleagues were and are Jews.87

Tangl’s response was categorized by the authors of the questionnaire among those “[w]ho did not give a meaningful answer, but draw attention to one aspect” of the question.⁸⁸ Theirs was a disingenuous assessment, coming as it did from a queristic tradition that sought meaning primarily in the practical and the practicable.

Epilogue

The age of questions was status-quo allergic. Querists did not accept that things had to be as they were. They not only posited the necessity of transformation but put their energies into deriving means for achieving that transformation.⁸⁹ The Great War was the crucible of the age, and querism’s emancipationist agenda translated into real revolutionary changes. Some of the most longstanding and seemingly intractable questions of the nineteenth century were considered either solved or at least sincerely addressed during and just after World War I: the Eastern question with the definitive dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Turkish Republic, the Polish question with the reappearance of Poland on the map of Europe,⁹⁰ and the two most significant subquestions under the umbrella known as the social question—the woman and the worker questions—with expanded suffrage for women throughout many Western and European countries and with the creation of a workers’ state in the form of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was not only the first state to make solving questions part of its raison d’être but may also have been the first to formally and officially declare a question solved.⁹¹

A spattering of “smaller” questions that had irritated domestic and international relations for a century had also largely disappeared: the American question with US independence, the slavery question with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833 and in the US in 1865, the serf question in Russia with the formal abolition of serfdom there in 1861, and the Irish question with Ireland’s formal independence in 1922. At both the national and international levels, a remarkable feature of the age was the tenacity and expediency with which veritable armies of politicians, publicists, intellectuals, and even average citizens turned their energies to understanding and deriving solutions to the questions of their time, doggedly debating them in the periodic press, pamphlets, and books, in representative bodies, at treaty negotiations and cabinet sessions, in debating clubs, and atop soapboxes until they were resolved or at least legislatively addressed.

Taking the long view, querists’ achievements are undeniable: the proportion of the voting public grew, empires were broken up, and the treaties after the Great War created governing units arguably more in tune with and responsive to their inhabitants’ wishes. Furthermore, of the questions that lingered after World War II—among them the black, gay, and environmental questions—many were clearly the progeny of progressive and specifically Marxist political and intellectual traditions.92

But the age did not have a categorically triumphant finale. Already in the late nineteenth century some querists used the rhetoric of “progress” to argue against emancipation.⁹³ And few would dare to argue that the Irish question was “solved” with Ireland’s independence, that the abolition of slavery effectively eliminated the “Negro question,” that Stalinism truly “solved” the woman question, or that the Polish or Jewish questions did not have deeply troubling afterlives following the Great War. Certainly the “Anschluß [Austrian annexation] question” of the interwar period, which became the subject of an Austrian question competition in 1927, could not be said to have a progressive underpinning, even if some viewed it as emancipatory at the time.⁹⁴

Furthermore, though it may be that the social question is no longer commonly invoked, the inequality it once sought to address is in the sights of contemporary progressives now as much as it was then. There are periodic mentions of the social question in political rhetoric, but these often coopt the emancipationist and progressive origins and achievements of the queristic endeavor for conservative ends. In 2016, for example, a political slogan of the conservative ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) read: “The social question of our time is the exploitation of the middle class.”95 Are these trajectories at base the fault of the nineteenth century’s emancipationist querists or a reaction to their unprecedented success?

In the words of the leftist French philosopher Félix Guattari writing in 1992, “The left and the workers’ movement have been built on the social question, on the question of misery.” What would bring about a comparable “existential anxiety” today? he wondered. “There has been a social question, which today takes on new forms; an urban question, a non-renewable energy question, a geopolitical question, a demographic question … The question of the question is how these questions are articulated.” Guattari worried about the “total ambiguity” of the more recent ecological question, which was inherently of neither the Right nor the Left. “If one makes it a natural question, one risks weighting the modes of questioning in the manner of totalitarianism.”⁹⁶

The likes of Weydmann and Hitler were conservative critics of the age of questions, who sought first to stand in the way of its goals and later to reverse its principal achievement: emancipation. That the Nazis turned the language of questions to their own purposes is testament mainly to querists’ success in setting the terms for transformative action. The Nazis could not defeat the spirit of the age, they could only attempt to roll back its accomplishments by deploying its rhetoric and perverting its emancipatory aims to suit their own agenda. It was in this spirit that the Nazis “solved” the social question; “reopened” the Transylvanian, Macedonian, Polish, Alsace-Lorraine, Croatian, Ukrainian, Slovak, and many other questions; and offered mass death and enslavement as a form of “emancipation,” as their Final Solution to the Jewish question. (The slogan wrought in iron over the entrance gates to Auschwitz-Birkenau was, after all, “Work will make you free.”)

The end of World War II and the definitive defeat of Nazi Germany restored some of the age’s most remarkable achievements, while burying its true essence under the moral taint of the Final Solution. This argument has been an excavation of that essence.