The Age of Questions

"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