The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and ... (Human Rights and Crimes Against Humanity) - Hardcover

Case, Holly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691131155 ISBN 13: 9780691131153

Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

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? Turning convention on its head with meticulous and astonishingly broad scholarship, The Age of Questions illuminates how patterns of thinking move history.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Holly Case is associate professor of history at Brown University.

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"The Age of Questions presents a whole new framework for thinking about social and political thought in the nineteenth century. Case ingeniously explores the urgent ‘questions’ that European commentators found so compelling, and she excavates the multifarious dimensions of these questions in all their interlocking complexity. With exceptional erudition concerning Eastern Europe as well as Western Europe, Case offers a comprehensive continental recovery of a crucial agenda in the European history of ideas."--Larry Wolff, New York University

"This smart, generative work does what most historians only dream of: out of an overused, unnoticed expression, it draws a key for understanding the fate of Europe’s nineteenth century. A history of how elites and intellectuals turned ‘questions’ into a dance revolving, often endlessly, around political and social problems, The Age of Questions is an epistemology--of how language and argument made and unmade possibilities for change, created and arrested temporal momentum, and lurched Europe into war."--Stefanos Geroulanos, author of Transparency in Postwar France

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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

By Holly Case

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2018 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-13115-3

Contents

Preface, xiii, 
Acknowledgments, xvii, 
Introduction, 1, 
Prologue: Questions and Their Predecessors, 8, 
1 The National Argument: The Imperial to the National Age, 35, 
2 The Progressive Argument: The Age of Emancipation, 72, 
3 The Argument about Force: The Loaded Questions of a Genocidal Age, 96, 
4 The Federative Argument: The Age of Erasing Borders, 135, 
5 The Argument about Farce: The Farcical Age, 153, 
6 The Temporal Argument: The Age of Spin, 180, 
7 The Suspension-Bridge Argument: The Age of Spanning Contradictions, 209, 
Notes, 223, 
Index, 319, 

CHAPTER 1

The National Argument

THE IMPERIAL TO THE NATIONAL AGE

Denn eben wo Begriffe fehlen, da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein. [At the point where conceptions are lacking, a word comes to the rescue.]

— THE DEVILISH MEPHISTO TO A STUDENT IN GOETHE'S FAUST (1808) CITED IN SÁNDOR RONYI'S APPROPRIATE PROGRAM FOR THE LEGAL AND PRACTICAL SOLUTION OF THE HUNGARIAN QUESTION (1865)

A Word-Making Age

"At the point where conceptions are lacking, a word comes to the rescue." This is a line from Goethe's Faust, which appeared in the first decade of the nineteenth century. The devil Mephisto is explaining to a student — in his devilish way — the opportunities afforded by sophistry and the uses of knowledge for personal gain. Words could possess a magical automatism (sich einstellen), the passage implies, offering an escape from failing concepts and perceptions. A word can substitute for understanding reality, or, more importantly, it can create a new reality ("with words a system can be built," the passage continues). Mephisto possessed the nineteenth century. This argument follows the word-makers.

* * *

Britain was the birthplace of the age of questions. A prehistory reveals both the centrality of Britain to the emergence and spread of questions, and the particularly British parliamentary stamp they initially bore. Many of the first "x questions" — the American, Catholic (later Irish), Carnatic, Oude, East India, and South American questions — touched upon the form and character of the British Empire and its relationship to the colonies. Later, with the treaty negotiations following the Napoleonic Wars, questions spread far and wide, and found their way into most corners of the globe. They would eventually acquire a different aspect in each language they entered, and each language nurtured its own unique spread of them. Examples from various national-linguistic contexts — German, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and American, to name a few — and a longer case study on the age of questions in Hungary reveal how distinct national contexts gave the same questions a very different character, or the way the same question was defined in comparison with or against the forms it took in other contexts.

An Imperial Prehistory of the Age

"The eighteenth century saw the evolution of the Parliamentary question," wrote the British historian P. D. G. Thomas. These were questions posed by parliamentarians to ministers on matters of policy that came to form the basis of debates around legislative decisions. By the end of the American Revolutionary War, they were an "established custom," Thomas observed. As these questions tended to center on perceived failures, shortcomings, or excess expenditures generated by government policy, it was likely this practice that contributed most directly to the emergence of the shorthand "the x question."

Among the oldest of the "x questions" was the American question. It was a peculiar outlier; in its original form, it had already faded away before the age of questions truly began but later experienced several reincarnations. An early reference to the American question appeared in Thomas Pownall's The Administration of the Colonies from 1764. Pownall, a former governer of one of the Thirteen Colonies, argued that "the Colonies, although without the limits of the realm, are yet in fact, of the realm ... and therefore ought ... to be united to the realm, in a full and absolute communication and communion of all rights, franchises and liberties, which any other part of the realm hath, or doth enjoy, or ought to have and to enjoy." "The precise ground on which this dangerous question ought to be settled," wrote Pownall, was:

how far they are to be governed by the vigour of external principles; by the supreme superintending power of the mother country: How far, by the vigour of the internal principles of their own peculiar body politic: And what ought to be the mode of administration, by which they are to be governed in their legislative, executive, judicial and commercial departments; in the conduct of their money, and revenues; in their power of making peace or war.

Up until 1793, the American question surfaced mainly in parliamentary debates, albeit with a marked capriciousness of nomenclature, sometimes even within a single source. In 1774, Edmund Burke made mention of "American questions" in a speech before parliament; in reference to a speech before the House of Lords from 1776 by Lord Temple, the editor(s) of a gentleman's magazine recounted Temple's remarks on "the grand American Question," "the question of sovereignty over America," and "debates on American questions."

On the eve of the American Revolution, the American question was most frequently mentioned in parliamentary debates as the issue of how to address the intensifying calls of the Colonies for representation. On February 24, 1775, the British nobleman and military officer John Griffin Griffin charged many of his fellow parliamentarians with having "uniformly shrunk ... from the great American question; they have wished to defer to the latest hour possible, all discussions of this critical topic," and determined to offer his own views "[h]owever grating to the ears of some individuals the subject may be." The tone of urgency (that deliberation and action were overdue) and necessary irritation were to become hallmarks of nineteenth-century questions.

Scientization, or the use of scientific metaphors to render a question (and its solution) comparable to mathematical problems, likewise appeared early. In a footnote to one of his sermons from 1769 published in an anthology more than two decades later, Richard Watson, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, noted,

A little before the time when this Sermon was preached the Colonies had begun to resist the Mother-Country; and I well remember, that I, even then, when the American Question was scarcely understood by any person, thought the resistance of the Colonies so reasonable, that I hesitated in calling them — disobedient. I soon after examined the question to the bottom, and saw, as clearly as I ever saw a proposition in Euclid, — that Taxation without Representation, real or virtual, was robbery and oppression.

By the time of Watson's footnote, most who mentioned the American question — including Watson himself — had concluded either implicitly or explicitly that the American...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton Univers. Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691131155
• ISBN 13: 9780691131153
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 360
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar