histories of generational type

Strauss and Howe emphasize the inevitability of cycles as the base unit of time. Paraphrasing the philosopher Mircae Eliade, they note how early humans were in tune to the cycles of the sky and seasons, agrarians and nomads that compared their “behavior with that of [their] ancestors […] performing the right deed at the right moment in the perpetual circle, much as an original god or goddess performed a similar deed during time’s mythical first circle.”1 For these peoples, generations meant “the set of all children ‘brought into being’ by a father or mother,”2 a history of kin and genealogical lineage, living lives of minimal variation from venerated ancestors. This order of time and its family generations were inevitably, periodically disrupted by catastrophic events that would create an indelible imprint on all those who lived through it, leading to the emergence of distinct cohort, or social generation3, those “sharing an age location in history and therefore a common peer personality.”4 Once these generations passed on, however, the memory of these events would as well, and a traditional homeostasis of family generations would resume. Strauss and Howe uses The Illiad and The Odyssey to illustrate this point: the Trojan War represented a unique event that mobilized a coalition of Greek states to a victorious conclusion, but after its resolution, its characters pass on and the unique moment “is worn down by the unchanging round of social tradition from which it had briefly emerged. The cycle vanishes, and the dark ages return – no longer giving rise to the stuff of epic poetry.”5

With the spread of writing, city-states, and empire across Eurasia through the Medieval Period, “Great Event” triumphs and catastrophe grew more common, requiring novel conceptions of time and place. Religious eschatologies rose in response to the breakdown of placid cycles of time, messianic visions of a descent from proverbial Golden Ages and Paradise towards an apocalypse and renewal of the world. For early recorded Indo-European history “the standard measure of cosmic time [...] was not the year or the century, but the generation,”6 for which a conflation of family and social generations was common. Family generations tracked the lineage of mythic figures and royalty, such as Bible’s chain of begetting from Adam, or as when “Herodotus spoke of ‘345 generations’ of Egyptian priests,”7 but ancient writers also noted cyclic stages of descending social generations following the founding of new regimes or religions, making “no implicit reference to parentage [but rather emphasize] that each new genos […] lives at about the same time and possess a distinct way of life and set of values.”8 Polybius’s observations on Greco-Roman city-states led to his model of a “recurring progression of political regimes – from kingship to aristocracy to democracy to anarchy – from which a new kingship would emerge.”9 Ibh Khaldun, paraphrased by Strauss and Howe, describes this pattern among medieval Islamic dynasties:

The first generation establishes rule by conquest, after which it governs with unquestioned authority. The second generation witnesses and admire that achievement, which it weakly emulates. Lacking firsthand knowledge of how the dynasty was established, the third generation not only lacks the founder’s qualities but ignores them, so the dynasty weakens further. Coming of age under ignorant tutelage, the fourth generation reaches adulthood despising the dynasty, which then crumbles. Out of the chaos a later generation produces a new king and a new dynasty, and the cycle repeats.10

Strauss and Howe describe how “the Greeks sometimes hoped that Promethean reason might delivery man from perpetual destitution, while the Romans believed [in] a glorious destiny,”11 but dynastic and empiric decline continued to predominate human conceptions of history and generations. The Romans used the Etruscan term saeculum, both organic and embodied measurements of “‘a long human life’ and ‘a natural century,”12 to “periodize their chronicles, especially when describing great wars and new laws,”13 finding great explanatory power in this length of time. In a strange coincidence, Rome fell just short of twelve centuries, just as Romulus was purported to prophesy “that Rome would last twelve units of time.”14

With the fall of Rome, Western monotheisms that “embrac[ed] the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama”15 began to “root out calendrical paganism, denounce classical cycles, and push underground entire branches of nonlinear learning, such as the hermetic fields of alchemy and astrology.”16 This set the stage for the widespread emergence of linear time from “a relatively arcane idea, fully understood by only a small clerical elite”17 to the dominant worldview of the West, beginning with the Renaissance. During this time, “the elites of Western societies began to perceive themselves as self-determining actors capable of altering the destiny of civilization.”18 “The Reformation and the spread of the printed Gospel usher[ed] in a new urgency (and popular application) of linear history,”19 its technological underpinning, the printing press, spurring a revolution in what it meant to identify as a people. As argued by historian Benedict Anderson, it paved the way for broadened and flattened conceptions of collective identity away from localities under shifting dynastic and sacred authority towards the “imagined community” of the modern nation-state, a novel entity bound by a shared vernacular language and secular stories distinct from rule and doctrine of more remote and less accountable elites.

The decline of centralized religious dogma and control, in tandem with the successes of rational inquiry and experimentation, inverted the descent of humanity towards a second coming of Christ into an upward path of reason, the torch of the Enlightenment carried higher on the shoulders of those who came before. The concept of the saeculum was revived as the old Latin’s dual meanings of a century and long life, signifying a revival of this measurement of cyclical time in Western consciousness,20 though without the implication of an endlessly repeating circle. These changes were nascent and heterogeneous in early modern Europe, however, where “meaningful membership in generations was limited to elites – that is, to those who were free to break from tradition and redefine the social roles of whatever phase of life they occupied.”21 A paradigmatic shift to widespread belief in linear progress and nationally-bound, peer-based generational cycles required a radical break from the past, an event that was unique to and initiated by the American colonies and their 18th Century revolution, based in shared principles of liberty and progress over that of a common origin or authority.

With the emergence of modern democracy and nation-states, peer cohort consciousness began to spread; Strauss and Howe track its origins to the propagandists of the French Revolution, “philosophes [who] liked to call themselves a unique generation”22 at the end of the ancien régime.23 In the following centuries, speculation about the nature of generations, the length of peer cohorts, and their power for social change became common among elite thinkers. Contemporary notions of social generations emerged in the 19th Century: John Stuart Mill “formally defined a generation as ‘a new set of human beings’ who ‘have been educated, have grown up from childhood, and have taken possession of society;’”24 Wilhelm Dilthey explicitly defined the distinction between family lineage and peer cohort generations,25 describing the latter as “a relationship of contemporaneity […] between those who had a common childhood, a common adolescence, and whose years of greatest vigor partially overlap;”26 Auguste Comte noted that generations have a “unanimous adherence to certain fundamental notions”27 and argued “generations had become, in the modern world, the master regulator of the pace of social change”28 Most theorists said too little or much about why generations were so central, but Comte, Émile Littré and Guiseppe Ferrari were exceptions at this time. They independently developed fourfold model of perpetuating generational cycles, in notable contrast to those which collapsed before restarting as writers of pre-modern historians had observed. This distinction can be likened to “a spiral turn[ing] in a circle while at the same time moving upward – or downward,”29 a synthesis of the two dominant frameworks of time and history, the circle and the line.

Theories of generations entered their own decline in the 20th Century, however. Following the horror and devastation of the Great War, “the link between generations and progress seemed like a waste of time”30 and a tired subject. Rising social thinkers preferred to describe “how each generation creates its own subjective reality, its own psychology, emotions, values, art,”31 such as José Ortega y Gasset, who viewed generations as a “dynamic compromise between the mass and the individual;”32 his student Julián Mariás, who observed “to ask ourselves to which generation we belong is, in large measure, to ask who we are,”33 or philosopher Martin Heidegger who observed, “the fateful act of living in and with one’s generation completes the drama of human existence.”34 Arnold Toynbee, Mariás, Samuel Huntington, and George Modelski all created their own fourfold models of generational rhythms around the mid-century, but the perennial reinvention of similar dynamical frameworks cannot overcome their absence of clear definitions or quantifiability. Modern historiographic research asks questions of generational type that mostly go unanswered: “how do they arise? why should they change personality at any particular cohort boundary? and why should they have any particular length?”35 As a consequence, generational theory has fallen out of intellectual favor just as it has risen in popular idiom. No “cohort-group has come fully of age in America without encountering at least one determined attempt to name it”36 since the 1920s, but generational type’s grand theoretical implications has gone the way of most other all-encompassing theories of the late modern period, “skeptics [now regarding] the cohort generation, like astrology, as a provocative idea searching blindly for a reason,”37 useful for demographic analysis but without greater explanatory power.

1Fourth Turning, 8.

2Generations, 434.

3This term is used in the Fourth Turning; Generations uses the equivalent term ‘cohort generations’

4Generations, 434

5Fourth Turning, 86-87.

6Generations, 433.

7Fourth Turning, 62.

8Generations, 434.

9Fourth Turning, 87.

10Fourth Turning, 88.

11Fourth Turning, 9.

12Fourth Turning, 26.

13Fourth Turning, 27.

14Fourth Turning, 27.

15Fourth Turning, 9.

16Fourth Turning, 10.

17Fourth Turning, 9.

18Fourth Turning, 34.

19Fourth Turning, 9.

20Fourth Turning, 34. “In romance languages, the word became vulgarized into the derivatives still used today: the Italian secolo, the Spanish siglo, and the French siécle.”

21Fourth Turning, 95.

22Generations, 438.

23Fourth Turning, 63: “At about the same time that Europeans began to talk self-consciously about centuries, they also began to talk explicitly about peer groups.”

24Generations, 438, quoting John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1840)

25Generations, 438.

26Fourth Turning, 63, quoting Giuseppe Ferrari, Teoria dei periodi politici (1874)

27Fourth Turning, 66, Quoting Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive (1869)

28Fourth Turning, 63.

29Generations, 349.

30Generations, 439.

31Generations, 439.

32The Fourth Turning, 68, quoting José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme (1923)

33The Fourth Turning, 67, quoting Julián Mariás, Generations: A Historical Method (trans. 1970/1967)

34The Fourth Turning, 69, quoting Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927)

35Generations, 440.

36Generations, 439.

37Generations, 440.