The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

by Neil Howe

Romulus founded Rome, he supposedly saw a flock of twelve vultures, which he took to be a signal that Rome would last twelve units of time. Eventually, the early Romans (who turned to Etruscan learning on such matters) came to assume that the twelve vultures must refer to twelve saecula. This assumption was confirmed by a set of prophetic books pr...

not long after Rome’s legendary founding in 753 BCE, Rome instituted the tradition of “saecular games.” This three-day, three-night extravaganza combined the athletic spectacle of a modern Olympics with the civic ritual of an American July Fourth centennial.

these ludi saeculares were timed to give most Romans a decent chance of witnessing them at some point in their lives.

saeculum aureum—a

the Romans always distinguished between a “civil” saeculum (a strict hundred-year unit of time) and a “natural” saeculum (the stuff of life and history).

In one of history’s more bizarre coincidences, Romulus’s vulture augury proved to be even more accurate than the original Etruscan prophecy.

The city of Rome was sacked by the Gothic chieftain Alaric in 410 CE, exactly thirty-eight years before the twelve hundredth anniversary of its legendary founding, ninety-seven years for each of the twelve vultures

In the Augustinian lexicon, the word “saeculum” lost its meaning as a specific length of time and came to refer to unbounded biblical time, as in saecula saeculorum, or “endless ages.”

With the rediscovery of classical texts, humanists became reacquainted with the lofty civic aspirations of the Greco-Roman world. With the advent of the Reformation, laypeople felt the rush of events as a preliminary to Christ’s return. Prior to that millennial event, they had reforms to fight for, fortunes to work for, ideals to be martyred for, and signs of grace to pray for. As time became more directional, history became more urgent.

Right at this threshold of modernity—when Columbus was voyaging, da Vinci painting, and Ferdinand and Isabella nation-building—the saeculum re-entered Western culture.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described each century as “loaded, fragrant.”

interior logic or spirit or Zeitgeist of each century as though no one could be compared to any other.

“The ancient Romans did not fix the return to their secular games with such a degree of precision; and when we talk of the siècle of Pericles, of the siècle of Augustus, of the siècle of Louis XIV, we mean that it has to do with siècles in the Roman sense, not with centuries.” Cournot’s siècle, of course, was the saeculum.

Meanwhile, starting around the middle of the twentieth century, the saeculum began to reveal

In the hands of historians and social scientists, it began to take shape as a clearly definable cycle of historical behavior—initially, as a cycle of war and peace.

Quincy Wright,

his epic Study of War,

In his Study, Wright observed that war-waging occurred “in approximately fifty-year oscillations, each alternate period of concentration being more severe.”

Vietnam. That happened right on the cusp of the “minor war” quadrant of Wright’s cycle.

Only a few years after his book appeared, Wright’s timetable was corroborated by a famous British historian and contemporary, Arnold J. Toynbee. In A Study of History, best known for its grand theory of the rise and fall of civilizations, Toynbee identified an “alternating rhythm” in a “Cycle of War and Peace.”

Punctuating this cycle were quarter-century “general wars” that had occurred in Europe at roughly one-century intervals since the Renaissance.

Toynbee identified and dated five repetitions of this cycle, each initiated by the most decisi...

Toynbee did something more. He subdivided the war cycle into four periods and identified a “breathing space” after a bigger war and a “general peace” after a smaller war.

L. L. Farrar, Jr., reconstructed Toynbee’s four-phase war theory and replaced the “breathing space” and “general peace” eras with what he calls “probing wars.”

Several other historians and social scientists have since broadened the Toynbeean cycle beyond war and peace into a more general thesis about global “long waves” of social behavior.

George Modelski and William R. Thompson agree that this “long cycle system” encompasses economic trends, but they insist its “regularities and repetitions” are driven primarily by power struggles between nation states to determine global dominance.

This global rite of passage is myth-generating in its scope: “The major event clusters of the cycle, the global war campaigns and the celebrated settlements, the ceremonial observances of the great nations, and the passing into obscurity of others, these make up the rituals of world politics. They are the key markers of world time.” The new winner, able to “set the rules,” may now enjoy “a golden age” and become “an object of respect, acclaim, and imitation.”

William Thompson presents the most recent (2020) and thorough presentation of the global long cycle thesis.

“Long waves,” he writes, “transform economies, culture, and geopolitics at the same time.”

What is at work here? What did Quincy Wright proclaim in his youth and resist in his old age? What rhythm did Arnold Toynbee see rippling through the “modern” age of every mature civilization he studied? It’s the unit of history the Etruscans discovered: the natural saeculum, history turning to the beat of a long human life.

However, one must note in the NIV Bible, Genesis 6:3 and Psalm 90:10 that mans days are not only numbered, in Psalm 90 there cycles of life that are also lamented in Ecceliastes and in Lamentations. Cycles have been with us since creation.

The culminating phase of the saeculum is a quarter-century era of war, upheaval, and turmoil.

scholars called this the revolutio, a word derived from the Copernican revolutiones orbium cælestium—implying, in some manner, a predictable moment of astronomical return.

krisis, refers to a decisive or separating moment.

Thomas Paine attached the word to political revolution in 1776, when he published his ragingly popular pamphlets,

Friedrich Nietzsche, nineteenth-century thinkers applied it to the periodic total wars that Karl Marx called “express trains of history.” By World War I, historian Gerhard Masur explains, “crisis” was widely understood to mean “a sudden acceleration of the historical process in a terrifying manner,”

Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next.

If we can locate and describe history’s winter solstice, we should be able to do likewise with its summer solstice.

An Awakening is the other solstice of the saeculum: It is to Crisis as summer is to winter, Love to Strife.

As the wheel turns from Crisis to Awakening and back again to Crisis, modern history shows a remarkable regularity. In Europe, every cycle but one ranges from 80 to 105 years.

What historians call the “long nineteenth century,” from 1815 to 1914, was a period of extraordinary peace among the great powers. But the peace was broken by one major disruption: an explosion of European nation-building wars fought between the mid-1850s and mid-1870s (involving Germany, France, Italy, England, Russia, and the Balkans)—not counting major wars outside Europe, including the U.S. Civil War. If this were deemed another Crisis era, and if the turn of the century were regarded as another Awakening era, the result would be one anomalously short cycle (1815 to about 1870) followed by another of nearly the usual length (1870 to the circa-1950 origins of the Cold War).

annuit coeptis (“God favored the creation”),

novus ordo seclorum (“the new order of the centuries”).

For the world, this invasion set in motion the most remarkable experiment in modern history: a society “born new,” hostile to tradition, obsessed with improvement, and surrounded by boundless natural resources. Both Europeans and Americans sensed that something epochal was underway.

Until the eighteenth century, the saeculum in America and Europe beat to a similar rhythm. Ever since, the American saeculum has shown a timing that is more regular and even better defined than the European cycles chronicled by Toynbee.

To see the pattern best, start with the present and move backward. Eighty years passed between the attack on Pearl Harbor and the attack on Fort Sumter. Eighty-five years passed between Fort Sumter and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Add two years (to Gettysburg), and you reach President Lincoln’s famous “fourscore and seven years” calculation. Back up again and note that 87 years is also the period between the Declaration and the climax of the colonial Glorious Revolution.

Over time, American historians have built a nomenclature around these successive dates. In the winter of 1861, when war loomed, both the Union and the Confederacy announced that this confrontation would constitute a “new revolution” and a “new declaration of independence.” In the 1930s, Charles and Mary Beard declared the Civil War to be the “Second American Revolution”—a label since reused countless times, most recently by James McPherson. Similarly, in the 1970s, historian Carl Degler called the New Deal “The Third American Revolution.” He pointed out that the Democratic Party, for decades afterward, successfully reminded voters of the “lessons of the Great Depression”—just as the Republican Party “waved the bloody shirt” for decades after the defeat of the South. In his magisterial history of the American Constitution, Bruce Ackerman identifies “not one, but three ‘founding’ moments in our history: the late 1780s, the late 1860s, and the mid-1930s.” Counting forward from the 1780s, then, we are now living under America’s third republic. Should we be preparing for another? More than twenty years ago, political scientist Walter Dean Burnham predicted “that the present politics of upheaval may lead to a fourth American republic.” In recent years, others across the political spectrum have echoed this “fourth republic” prediction. Now that the Millennial Crisis has begun, we can point to the probable timing of its arrival: sometime shortly before or after the Millennial Cris...

McLoughlin identifies five American Awakenings: first, the “Puritan Awakening” in the seventeenth century; then, the “Great Awakening” in the eighteenth; and next, the “Second,” “Third,” and “Fourth” Awakenings starting in the 1820s, 1890s, and 1960s, respectively.

American Awakenings, he notes, have a symbiotic relationship with national Crises:

is therefore hard to imagine that the resolution of the Millennial Crisis—whatever that may be—can avoid being interpreted as history’s judgment on how the contradictory values agendas unleashed by the Consciousness Revolution are ultimately resolved.

plausible dates for the end of the Millennial Crisis. The early 2030s (best guess 2033) represents our estimate of the resolution of the Crisis era—with the climax occurring several years earlier (perhaps in 2030). These dates are roughly consistent with the timetable suggested by the “world system” and “long cycle” theories we examined earlier. Thompson, in his extensive 2020 examination of the global long cycle, concludes that the current “United States global system” is likely to enter its closing “global war” phase in 2030. Joshua Goldstein, another much-published scholar of long cycles, would put the highest likelihood of great-power war “in the late 2020s.” These are close to the crisis climax target dates forecasted by the earliest global-system theorists back in the 1980s: 2025 or 2030. In other words, the target dates haven’t shifted much.