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

by William Strauss

better word is crisis. Its Greek root krisis refers to a decisive or separating moment. In disease, the krisis is when physicians know whether a patient will recover or die; in war, it is the moment in battle that determines whether an army (or nation) will triumph or fall. Thomas Paine attached the word to political revolution in 1776, when he began publishing his renowned American Crisis pamphlets. From Metternich to Burckhardt to Nietzsche, a host of nineteenth-century thinkers applied it to the periodic total wars that Marx called “express trains of history.” By World War I, historian Gerhard Masur explains, the word was widely understood to mean “a sudden acceleration of the historical process in a terrifying manner,” sufficient to “release economic, social, and moral forces of unforeseen power and dimensions, which often make return to the status quo impossible.” The Crisis ends one saeculum and launches the next. Yet if it denotes the cycle’s maximum moment of yang, or strife, a curious asymmetry seems to arise: What denotes the cycle’s opposite extreme, the maximum moment of yin, or love? If we can locate and describe history’s winter solstice, we should be able to do likewise with its summer solstice.