A Generational Split Personality

by Dish Staff

Jesse Walker pans Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss:

A generation, Strauss and Howe wrote, is “a society-wide peer group, born over a period roughly the same length as the passage from youth to adulthood (in today’s America, around twenty or twenty-one years), who collectively possess a common persona.” They accepted the existence of exceptions and edge cases, but they insisted a core persona is there.

Contrast that with Karl Mannheim’s “The Problem of Generations,” a 1923 essay that has become a touchstone for sociologists studying generational change. Like Strauss and Howe, Mannheim defined a generation not just by when its members were born but by the events that shaped their worldviews in their youth. Unlike Strauss and Howe, Mannheim did not write as though those events shape an entire generation the same way. Instead he wrote of different “generation units” with different reactions to their formative experiences. The Napoleonic wars, he elaborated, produced “two contrasting groups” in Germany, “one that became more and more conservative as time went on, as against a youth group tending to become rationalistic and liberal.” (For a more recent example, consider the ways different American boomers reacted to the upheavals of the 1960s.)

For Mannheim, those opposing units still belong to the same social cohort: “they are oriented toward each other, even though only in the sense of fighting one another.” But they did not have the “common persona” that Strauss and Howe imagined.