Columns of print commentary on current events in the nineteenth century devoted themselves to raising and responding to questions in nineteenth-century newspapers and pamphlets. “The Eastern question was arguably the grandest” of them all (186), but, as Holly Case demonstrates in The Age of Questions, journalists and politicians also queried the “social question,” the “women's question,” and the “Jewish question,” as well as the “bullion question” and the question about the help. Periodicals took up timeliness, and the up-to-date filled out the periodicals.

It is a brilliant task to undertake the examination of this roilsome inquiring discourse regarding the nature of social and political problems in the modern era. By posing questions, observers approached society in a finely tuned mechanical way in which new kinds of component parts such as class, religion, ethnicity, and nationality interacted in increasingly volatile ways. There was a new alertness to design, control, and amelioration, as well as to acceleration, intractability, and to the imminent collapse into a state of war. At the same time, raising questions helped create an extra-parliamentary international court of public opinion to which the promoters of a variety of causes could appeal and which legislators and diplomats needed to heed. As early as 1814, the British foreign secretary urged Tsar Alexander I to get “public opinion behind you” (47). As Case argues, most questions were about particular problems, not philosophical dilemmas, but raising questions as problems also created pernicious solutions. Querists tended to hyperbole; they continuously cried out, as the pacifist activist Bertha von Suttner pointed out, “War in sight” (108). “The age of questions made the Great War thinkable” (6). It also made final solutions and the “Final Solution” thinkable.

Case firmly situates the age of questions in the nineteenth century. It was an age that screeched, thundered, and hawked in the debates about personal freedom, national sovereignty, and social justice and was energized by advancing literacy and public activism across the continent. Her sources, over which she has an amazing command, include texts written in Czech, Greek, Magyar, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish and reveal the panoply of nationalist sensitivities. Since an age of questions prospers in a time when things are not unquestionable but instead seem mismatched, when a gap yawns between ideals and reality, it makes sense that the questions started to appear during the 1815–1830s period, the years of restoration when Europeans digested the revolution. In a period of extreme ideological polarization such as the 1930s, the question of literature seemed more quaint than pertinent, and lacked a ready-made public that could be swayed. After the “Final Solution,” when the Nazis implemented radical solutions to the questions they posed, the genre of questions more or less came to end, although problems and conflicts themselves have not disappeared. It would be interesting to consider if manifestos such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) inaugurated a new age of questions around climate change.

The specter of revolution was “the Question” that dominated the Congress of Vienna, which compelled the powers to act in congress to wage war, if necessary, to restore the international order (212). A quarter of a century earlier, in 1789, the French Revolution had raised enormous hopes in which universal affection for the ideals of freedom, democracy, and peace supposedly promised the abolition of all forms of servitude. “Much the greatest event” that “ever happened in the world,” wrote the British Whig leader, Charles James Fox at the end of July. It was easy to imagine that all sorts of questions that derived from what Kant referred to as the “self-imposed immaturity” of men and women would be easily solved. But the revolution quickly made questions into problems when men of virtue pursued the ends of terror, becoming, in Danton's words, the “exterminating angels of liberty;” when buoyant revolutionaries did not dissolve traditional authorities in spheres of religion and the family; and when the armies of the republic conquered and occupied foreign territories in an intensifying nationalist war that revived military spirit, declared the “citizens” “dissolved,” and established the ancient tyranny of the First Consul who depended on “brilliant deeds” for legitimacy. How and why did revolutionary ideals falter? Was their application too absolute, too vain, too unrealistic? Could ideals—“fantasy” and “dreams,” as Case states citing Hegel—manage competing economic and national interests? As the statesmen at the Congress of Vienna understood very well, the ideas of the revolution could not be erased. Indeed, the contradictory array of interests that made up society took on volatile social and political forms. The new sociological perspective of class, interest, and party provided the fodder to the age of questions.

According to the author of one book on the “social question,” published in 1871, the “double organization of the population” in the modern state occurred along two axes: political and economic. However, the principle of freedom and equality was unevenly applied. The “social question” itself was the function of the fact that “out of legal freedom and equality there emerged economic un-freedom and inequality” (81). The point can be taken further. Principles of “legal freedom and equality” were contradicted by ontological definitions that denied the humanity of slaves or the political maturity of colonized peoples or by laws restricting the rights of Catholics, Jews, and women. As the European empires expanded and the rights of legislatures increased, the “Catholic question,” the “Jewish question,” and the “women's question” posed themselves more insistently. Often enough, however, the questions were turned around so that the problem in question was how to deny in practice what seemed self-evident in principle. The “women's question” persisted precisely because so many querists rejected full equality. Principles of “legal freedom and equality” were further contradicted by the legitimacy of the Great Powers, whose rule rested on the imperial subjugation of national rights so that the “Eastern question” remained alive for one hundred years in the form of the “Greek question,” the “Polish question,” the “Slav question,” and so on.

Revolution offered a way and the impetus to measure the real against the ideal. It also made a powerful historical case for the futility of achieving stability and restoration. According to Hannah Arendt, “the tremendous intellectual change which took place in the middle of the [nineteenth] century” was “the refusal to view or accept anything ‘as it is’” and to interpret “everything as being only a stage of some further development.”Footnote ¹ “This irritation with the status quo,” Case adds, became “a general one” through the formulation and discussion of questions (207). The word “irritation” is a good one because Case takes pains not make the age of questions correspond in simple fashion with the age of emancipation. The “Jewish question,” for example, was not formulated in order to advance the legal equality of Jews but to underscore the difference of Jews in the wider field of social variety. The question was to demonstrate the intractability of the alleged problem. Jacob Toury, who explored the origins of the “Judenfrage,” argued that Jews “could not concede the existence of a ‘Jewish question’” since it enhanced rather than undid their stigmatization.Footnote ² “It is only a question,” wrote another Jewish commentator in 1916, “to those who believe that our being, our existence, our worth, our survival, our development are not facts or plusses, but rather doubtful, wavering uncertainties, in a word: questions” (118). More pernicious still were the ways in which the “Jewish question” in an age of questions legitimated and popularized suspicion that Jews as such constituted a general menace that required a solution. Once posed, the question suddenly became one of the most pressing and discussed issues of the time. The “Jewish question” had the effect of categorizing Jews; scrutiny, identification, and selection followed.

War hovers along the horizon of the age of questions. One of the paradoxes of the age, Case explains, was “the belief that a universal war would be the result of a failure to solve” the questions and the concurrent “belief that only a universal war could solve them” (211). In ways that are not fully explained, but already appear in the protocols of the Congress of Vienna, the age of questions provoked violent and transgressive solutions. It is worth pondering how the questions enabled and escalated the “war that will end war,” the title of H.G. Wells’ 1914 book. The solutions that questioned and formulated problems usually veered toward the definitive when questions were bundled together. Case herself moves the reader from “final solutions” to the “Final Solution,” which paradoxically put an end to the age of questions. There is a genocidal menace to the more than one hundred years of questions, especially when they were ontological, “ones that spoke to the essence of a people or peoples” (117). These are valuable but unconnected insights. While a tract on the “social question” might well have been well-intentioned if short of the mark, a contribution of the “Jewish question” had an unmistakable sinister edge.

Unfortunately, Case's extremely good idea is not fully realized. Although the text is short and written in a sprightly manner, it feels like one long introduction to an analysis that never comes. Formal properties such as the sense of urgency, the mutual attraction of questions to one another, and the paradoxes of the age are identified. But the reader never gets a fully-drawn picture of any of the big questions: the “Eastern question,” the “social question,” the “women's question,” and “the Jewish question.” What exactly was the relationship between these questions and their formulation as questions and World War I or the “Final Solution” and how did these disasters bring the age to a close? We thumb through lots of pamphlets without seeing how posing questions changed the way contemporaries thought about and acted on politics or how they constituted politics. Too many circumscribed examples—the result of Google and other digital searches—effectively postpone engagement. The argument gains neither the altitude nor the depth it anticipates. The exclamation mark she proposes for the age of questions persistently dissolves in the mind of the sympathetic but disappointed reader into a question mark.