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

by Neil Howe

Thus far we have been presenting these seasons of history entirely in terms of repeating patterns and abstract social processes—like cycles of war and peace, the dynamics of a “world system,” or recurring “revitalization movements.” This approach may be sufficient to explain what the saeculum is. But it does little to explain what motivates it. Why, at a personal level, do people feel compelled to drive history forward in this manner? The approach also does little to explain its timing. Why couldn’t the saeculum have a periodicity of fifty years—or two hundred years?

Each new generation, as it assumes leadership, redefines a nation’s history according to its own collective experience.

All our lives we remain a prisoner of the generation we belonged to at age twenty. —CHARLES AUGUSTIN SAINTE-BEUVE

Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah (“Introduction to History”), a stunningly original and unified theory of politics, sociology, economics, and history.

‘asabiyya—Arabic for “group feeling” or “social cohesion.”

there’s this important difference. Whereas the life cycle represents the wheel of time experienced by each person, the saeculum represents the wheel of time experienced by an entire society or nation. Generations are created precisely through the intersection of these two seasonal cycles, one personal and the other collective.

Now imagine that the society is suddenly hit by a Great Event (what sociologist Karl Mannheim called a “crystallizing moment”), some emergency, perhaps a war, so consequential that it transforms all of society’s members yet transforms them differently according to their phase-of-life responses.

If the Great Event is successfully resolved, its enduring memory imparts to each group a unique location in history—and a distinct generational persona.

Through five centuries of Anglo-American history, no span of more than fifty years (the duration of two phases of life) has ever elapsed without the occurrence of a Crisis or an Awakening. Every generation has thus been shaped by either a Crisis or an Awakening during one of its first two phases of life—and has encountered both a Crisis and an Awakening at some point through its life cycle.

Every forty years or so, the persona of each phase of life becomes nearly the opposite of that established by the generation that had once passed through

we first notice a generational difference, we often interpret it as a mere phase-of-life difference. “If you aren’t a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, but if you aren’t a conservative when you’re middle-aged, you have no head,” goes the old saying—which (in its various wordings) has been attributed to Edmund Burke, François Guizot, Benjamin Disraeli, and Winston Churchill.

Liberal parents often end up raising conservative kids. And even when their kids also regard themselves as liberal, we can bet that it will be a species of liberalism alien to their parents’.

If the connection between generations and history is so powerful, why haven’t people always known about it?

People have. At the dawn of recorded history, the generation (not the year) was the universal standard of social time.

Greek poets used sequential “generations” to mark the successive appearance of Gaea, Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus.

chain of generations, each begetting and ra...

gen-, means (as a verb) nothing more specific than “to come or bring into being” or (as a noun) anything new “brought into being.” Applied to people, it can assume alternative meanings. One meaning is the family generation: everyone brought into being by the same biological parent—used in such phrases as “fourth-generation” heir. The other meaning is the social generation: everyone brought into being by nature or society around the same time. Social generations refer to entire peer groups, as when the New Testament speaks of “a faithless and perverse generation” or the poet Hesiod of “generations” of gold or silver or bronze.

With the arrival of modernity, however, this changed. Just when the West began to talk about centuries, so too did it begin to talk self-consciously about new peer groups.

Shortly before the French Revolution, social generation theories exploded on the scene—with

In the aftermath of World War I, Karl Mannheim, José Ortega y Gasset, François Mentré (who coined the term “social generation” in a book by that name), and many others

Yet even as this flood of generational self-consciousness expands, its breadth has grown faster than its depth. Just as we shun the concept of a cycle the more we actually encounter regular social cycles, so do we trivialize the concept of a generation the more we find ourselves talking about how pop music has changed from Jim Morrison to Kurt Cobain to Taylor Swift. Each generation’s link with pop music, social media, and technology has become far better understood (and accepted) than its profound connection to nature and history.

Why do we moderns celebrate endless generational novelty? Because it indulges our expectation of unbounded progress. Why do we resist the wheel of time? Because it undermines that illusion. While modernity is all about controlling the future, generations in fact tie us to our past and to age-old dynamics of social behavior.

When the leaders are utopian ideologues, they may be so certain they possess the key to unlimited progress that (like the French revolutionaries or the Italian fascists) they will restart the civic calendar at Year One (in 1792 and 1922, respectively). And they may feel so threatened by memories of the past that, like Stalin or Pol Pot, they will try to liquidate the elite of any generation that came of age before their revolution began. “Who controls the past controls the future,” runs Big Brother’s party slogan in George Orwell’s 1984, and “Who controls the present controls the past.”

Anthony Esler that “the generational approach may, in fact, provide one of the royal roads to total history.”

“You belong to it, too. You came along at the same time. You can’t get away from it,”

“You’re a part of it whether you want to be or not.” To Wolfe, as to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, and other writers of the 1920s, membership in that generation reflected a variety of mannerisms: weary cynicism at an early age, risk-taking, binge-like behavior, disdain for a pompous “older generation.”

“If there is such a thing as a Lost Generation in this country,” Wolfe wrote by then, “it is probably made up of those men of advanced middle age who still speak the language that was spoken before 1929, and who know no other. These men indubitably are lost.” By referring to his generation, in other words, Wolfe was not using a shorthand to refer to any fixed phase of life. He was referring rather to a particular group of people who, over time, aged through every phase of life. Wolfe’s Lost Generation literati never explained exactly how they identified their “generation.” But the question must be raised: In a world in which people are born every minute, how can social generations be located and their birth year boundaries defined?

Since the early nineteenth century, this implies that it should average about twenty-one years, although the length may vary somewhat for each generation depending on the noise of history and the precise timing of Great Events.

Next, to apply these lengths to real birth years, you locate an underlying generational persona. Every generation has one. It’s a distinctly human—and variable—creation, with attitudes about family life, gender roles, institutions, politics, religion, lifestyle, and the future.

every generation “is born, lives, and dies.” It can feel nostalgia for a unique past, express urgency about a future of limited duration, and comprehend its own mortality.

There is no fixed formula for identifying the persona of a real-life generation. But it helps to look for three attributes: first, a generation’s common location in history; second, its common beliefs and behavior; and third, its perceived membership in a common generation.

Common lo...

“a community of time and space” and face “the same concrete historical problems.”

“zones of dates” which make members of a generation “the same age vitally and historically.”

“to ask ourselves to which generation we belong is, in large measure, to ask who we are.”

Perhaps the most important aspect of a generation’s self-perception is its sense of direction.

Mannheim referred to each generation’s sense of “essential destiny.”

generation can collectively choose its destiny.

But you cannot personally choose your generation—any more than you can choose your parents, your ethnicity, or your native land. That much is fate, conditioning much about who you are.

belonging to a generation “throws us into” the world at a single time and place, thereby shaping both our outlook and our options. “The fateful act of living in and with one’s generation,” ...

Every twenty years or so, Americans are surprised to encounter a new rising generation. They are struck by some publicized event or situation in which youth seem to behave very differently than the youth who came just before. This typically happens when the oldest members of the new generation are in their late twenties or early thirties. The average periodicity of these events is significant. At 21.5 years, it is very close to the average recent length of a phase of life—and of a generation.

This list may point to mere events, but if you reflect closely on the events themselves, you will find that each gives expression to the youthful persona of a distinct generation—a generation with its own location in history, its own worldview, and its own sense of “essential destiny.” If you belong to America, you belong to an American generation. The same is probably true of most of your ancestors and heirs. All of history is nothing more than a sequence of collective biographies like yours and theirs.

The sequence of Anglo-American generations shown in Chart 3-4 is corroborated by historians who have written about American generations over the last century. Most have identified a similar sequence of generations situated at roughly the same dates. How long are the generations shown here? The entire panorama divides 570 birth years into twenty-four generations, for a total average length of twenty-four years.

For the fourteen generations born before and during the American Revolution, the average le...

The generational birth years also coincide with the saecular rhythm of alternating Crises and Awakenings. When you compare dates, you will find that the first birth year of each generation usually lies just a few years before the opening or closing year of a Crisis or Awakening.

Finally, we notice the recurring pattern within each saeculum. The first generation comes of age with an Awakening, while the second has an Awakening childhood; the third comes of age with a Crisis, while the fourth has a Crisis childhood. Each of these four locations in history is associated with a generational archetype: Prophet, Nomad, Hero, and Artist. Throughout Anglo-American history, with only one exception (the U.S. Civil War, when the Hero was skipped), these archetypes have always followed one another in the same order.

Due to this recurring pattern, America has always had the same generational constellation during every Crisis or Awakening—that is, the same archetypal lineup entering the four phases of life.

Carl Jung, who described his own quaternity (thinking, intuition, feeling, sensation) by acknowledging his debt to ancient poet-philosophers like Heraclitus.

inspired a growing number of four-type psychosocial theories and therapies, including the well-known Myers-Briggs “personality type indicator.”

Jungian archetypes, often in their titles (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover or Awakening the Heroes Within).