The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny

by William Strauss

An Awakening is the other solstice of the saeculum: It is to Crisis as summer is to winter, love to strife. Within each lies the causal germ of its opposite. In the second quarter of the saeculum, the confidence born of growing security triggers an outburst of love that leads to disorder; in the fourth quarter, the anxiety born of growing insecurity triggers an outburst of strife that reestablishes order. An Awakening thus serves as a cycle marker, reminding a society that it is halfway along a journey traversed many times by its ancestors. Wurthnow observes that “periods of religious unrest…have, of course, been regarded as portents of change—as historical watersheds—at least since Herodotus.”