The History and Theory of Generational Cycles (Part I)

Delineating Bill Strauss and Neil Howe's Model of Social Change

Does history repeat?

If you ask a historian, they may humor the suggestion of a literal recurrence, perhaps conceding that some events may metaphorically rhyme. Humans don’t have unlimited agency to shape our fates, after all; despite our many advances in embodied and material technologies, we possess the same fundamental needs and behavioral inclinations as we had millennia ago, restraining our responses to present and novel events. Inherited, rational knowledge of the past is rarely a substitute for the intuitive wisdom of first-hand experience, often dooming us to chronically relearn hard lessons.¹ To suggest these patterns have a sustained regularity is a far more exceptional claim, however, demanding exceptional evidence.

Among laypeople, some cyclical models like Spengler’s theory of civilizational decline or the Schlesingers’ political oscillations between conservatism and liberalism may be intriguing, but history is most commonly understood in terms of two unidirectional visions articulated by historian Richard Tarnas: “a predominantly problematic, even tragic narrative of humanity’s gradual but radical fall and separation from an original state of oneness with nature and an encompassing spiritual dimension of being,”² or “the evolution of human consciousness as an epic narrative of human progress, a long heroic journey from a primitive world of dark ignorance, suffering, and limitation to a brighter modern world of ever-increasing knowledge, freedom, and well-being.”³ The former has affinity with Christian and conservative principles that defend against further descent, the latter with modern reforming and revolutionizing impulses for further transcendence, best embodied by the ideals of the Enlightenment and the rise of secular democracy. The former intimates a downward line of time, the latter upward.

The contemporary period has thrown these complementary visions into a state of profound uncertainty, as the double-edged power of instrumental reason and industry have produced unprecedented ease and devastation through the twentieth century. Secular grand narratives of history like Communism and Nazism were sacralized and justified horrors that modernity was believed to have overcome,“the Enlightenment vision beginning to encounter its own shadow.”⁴ In response, some, like the typified historian above, contend that “no coherent pattern actually exists in human history or evolution […] which itself is shaped and constructed by forces beyond itself and beyond the awareness of the interpreting subject.”⁵ In this light, history is best understood, in historian Arnold Toynbee’s words, “one dang thing after another,” too complex at best or ultimately arbitrary at worst.

While containing some truth, this reaction to the one-sidedness of modernity is itself a one-sided framework that exacerbates the prevailing crises of meaning and purpose that hang over much of humankind. History should not be an instrumental tool for ideology, but it does not suffice as mere objective description of the past or collection of brute facts; it serves a fundamental function, like mythologies of old, to provide an essential sense of time and place in the world. Whether secular or spiritual, these stories ground us in real or imagined pasts that help envision idealized good or bad futures to strive towards or against.

This pragmatic approach to history may have little purchase in academia, but the gulf  between worldviews need not be incommensurate for the many who may be amenable to dispassionate and robust models of history, even those proposing cyclical time. This appeal to the skeptical yet curious is best exemplified by a theory proposed by independent historians Neil Howe and late Bill Strauss, who too call for a return of humanity to mind the cycles of the natural world, against the “scholarly rejection of time’s inner logic [and the] devaluation of history throughout [American] society.”⁶

As analysts and aids in Washington, their shared interests led to their collaboration on a history of the United States through its generations and their life cycles. As Howe explains, “along the way [they] discover[ed] some outstanding patterns in history,”⁷ a fourfold cycle of historical moods that shape and are shaped by generational cohorts, first presented in their 1991 book Generations.⁸ In their 1998 follow-up The Fourth Turning, they provide additional evidence for precedent correlations to their theory, both mythic and academic. In a recent 2023 book The Fourth Turning is Here, Neil Howe revisits this theory and expounds on how he sees the rest of the 2020s unfolding. In all three books, they prophesy an event of symbolic equivalence to the American Revolution, Civil War, and Great Depression and World War II period to occur by the end of the decade, “bone-jarring crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new form.”⁹

Few historians appear to support Strauss and Howe’s theory;¹⁰ reviews often compare their work to the gold standard of all-encompassing, overdetermined, and non-falsifiable pseudoscience, astrology. Nonetheless, its insights have not without profound consequences: Strauss and Howe’s name for the generation rising at the time of their first book, Millennials, has become common; Generations inspired Bill Clinton to select fellow Boomer Al Gore as his Vice President, seeking a like-minded partner in the Oval Office;¹¹ and Howe remains recognized as a preeminent researcher on generations.¹² The popular success of Strauss and Howe’s framework is undoubtedly due to their generational types fitting the common idioms of American cohorts: industrious GIs, conciliatory Silents, righteous Boomers, and cynical Generation X. This appeal to intuition in turn lends plausibility to its predictive implications, as the suggestion of a coming crisis mirroring the major wars of United States history inspires many crusaders for radical change across the political spectrum, including Steve Bannon, former adviser of president Donald Trump.¹³ Strauss and Howe’s first book Generations explicitly named a “Crisis of 2020”¹⁴ as a pivotal year,¹⁵ leading to less partisan and more reputable interest in the theory in the wake of the year’s pandemic and escalating violence at protests.¹⁶

To unpack generational cycles, we will begin with the history of its development and the differentiation of family and social generations, followed by a review of its theory of individual and social life cycles and how they operate as an engine for social progress.¹⁷ This framework is then applied to the United States’ history, first looking at the “Great Events” followed by a review of the periods between them. The particular typologies and life cycles of the four generational types are addressed, but are left largely unexplored. An interested reader could readily find them discussed widely.

The History of Generational Cycles

Strauss and Howe emphasize the inevitability of cycles as the base unit of time. In contrast to the contemporary dominance of linear time, for “nearly all of the millennia that humanity has (to our knowledge) thought about time at all, a very different paradigm was dominant: the cycle.”¹⁸ Paraphrasing the philosopher Mircae Eliade, they note how early humans were in tune to the rhythms of the sky and seasons, agrarians and nomads that compared their “behavior with that of [their] ancestors […] performing the right deed at the right moment in the perpetual circle, much as an original god or goddess performed a similar deed during time’s mythical first circle.”¹⁹ In this way, their adherence to “cycles conquered the fear of chaos by repetition and example.”²⁰

For these peoples, generations meant “the set of all children ‘brought into being’ by a father or mother,”²¹ a history of kin and genealogical lineage, living lives of minimal variation from venerated ancestors, each successive generation instilling the same stable customs, values, and taboos. This order of time and its family generations were inevitably, periodically disrupted by catastrophic events that would create an indelible imprint on all those who lived through it, leading to the emergence of distinct cohort, or social generations,²² those “sharing an age location in history and therefore a common peer personality.”²³ Once these generations passed on, however, the memory of these events would as well. “Social inertia [nudges] everyone back to the traditional life cycle. People will still have different phase-of-life roles according to their age, but they will no longer show striking generational differences in how they fill their roles;”²⁴ the traditional homeostasis of family generations resumes. Strauss and Howe uses The Illiad and The Odyssey to illustrate this point:²⁵ the Trojan War represented a unique event that mobilized a coalition of Greek states to a victorious conclusion, but after its resolution, its characters pass on and the unique moment “is worn down by the unchanging round of social tradition from which it had briefly emerged. The cycle vanishes, and the dark ages return – no longer giving rise to the stuff of epic poetry.”²⁶

With the spread of writing, city-states, and empire across Eurasia through the Medieval Period, “Great Event” triumphs and catastrophe grew more common, requiring novel conceptions of time and place. Religious eschatologies rose in response to the breakdown of placid cycles of time, messianic visions of a descent from proverbial Golden Ages and Paradise towards an apocalypse and renewal of the world. For early recorded Indo-European history “the standard measure of cosmic time [...] was not the year or the century, but the generation,”²⁷ for which a conflation of family and social generations was common. Family generations tracked the lineage of mythic figures and royalty, such as Bible’s chain of begetting from Adam, or as when “Herodotus spoke of ‘345 generations’ of Egyptian priests,”²⁸ but ancient writers also noted cyclic stages of descending social generations following the founding of new regimes or religions, making “no implicit reference to parentage [but rather emphasize] that each new genos […] lives at about the same time and possess a distinct way of life and set of values.”²⁹ Polybius’s observations on Greco-Roman city-states led to his model of a “recurring progression of political regimes – from kingship to aristocracy to democracy to anarchy – from which a new kingship would emerge.”³⁰ Historian Ibh Khaldun (1332-1406) saw “the security and prosperity of a kingdom … rise and fall in lockstep with the growth and decline of its ‘asabiyya’—Arabic for ‘group feeling’ or ‘social cohesion.’”³¹ Paraphrased by Strauss and Howe, Khaldun describes this pattern among medieval Islamic dynasties:

The first generation establishes rule by conquest, after which it governs with unquestioned authority. The second generation witnesses and admire that achievement, which it weakly emulates. Lacking firsthand knowledge of how the dynasty was established, the third generation not only lacks the founder’s qualities but ignores them, so the dynasty weakens further. Coming of age under ignorant tutelage, the fourth generation reaches adulthood despising the dynasty, which then crumbles. Out of the chaos a later generation produces a new king and a new dynasty, and the cycle repeats.³²

Strauss and Howe describe how “the Greeks sometimes hoped that Promethean reason might delivery man from perpetual destitution, while the Romans believed [in] a glorious destiny,”³³ but dynastic and empiric decline continued to predominate human conceptions of history and generations. The Romans used the Etruscan term saeculum, both organic and embodied measurements of “‘a long human life’ and ‘a natural century,”³⁴ to “periodize their chronicles, especially when describing great wars and new laws,”³⁵ finding great explanatory power in this length of time.³⁶ In a strange coincidence, Rome fell just short of twelve regular centuries, just as Romulus was purported to prophesy “that Rome would last twelve units of time.”³⁷

With the fall of Rome, Western monotheisms that “embrac[ed] the radically new concept of personal and historical time as a unidirectional drama”³⁸ began to “root out calendrical paganism, denounce classical cycles, and push underground entire branches of nonlinear learning, such as the hermetic fields of alchemy and astrology.”³⁹ This set the stage for the widespread emergence of linear time from “a relatively arcane idea, fully understood by only a small clerical elite”⁴⁰ to the dominant worldview of the West,⁴¹ beginning with the Renaissance. During this time, “the elites of Western societies began to perceive themselves as self-determining actors capable of altering the destiny of civilization.”⁴² “The Reformation and the spread of the printed Gospel usher[ed] in a new urgency (and popular application) of linear history,”⁴³ its technological underpinning, the printing press, spurring a revolution in what it meant to identify as a people. As argued by historian Benedict Anderson, it paved the way for broadened and flattened conceptions of collective identity away from localities under shifting dynastic and sacred authority towards the “imagined community” of the modern nation-state, a novel entity bound by a shared vernacular language and secular stories distinct from rule and doctrine of more remote and less accountable elites.

The decline of centralized religious dogma and control, in tandem with the successes of rational inquiry and experimentation, inverted the descent of humanity towards a second coming of Christ into an upward path of reason and progress, the torch of the Enlightenment carried higher on the shoulders of those who came before. The concept of the saeculum was revived as the old Latin’s dual meanings of a century and long life, signifying a revival of this measurement of cyclical time in Western consciousness,⁴⁴ though without the implication of an endlessly repeating circle. These changes were nascent and heterogeneous in early modern Europe, however, where “meaningful membership in generations was limited to elites – that is, to those who were free to break from tradition and redefine the social roles of whatever phase of life they occupied.”⁴⁵ A paradigmatic shift to widespread belief in linear progress and nationally-bound, peer-based generational cycles required a radical break from the past, an event that was unique to and initiated by the American colonies and their 18^th Century revolution, based in shared principles of liberty and progress over that of a common origin or authority.

With the emergence of modern democracy and nation-states, peer cohort consciousness began to spread; Strauss and Howe track its origins to the propagandists of the French Revolution, “philosophes [who] liked to call themselves a unique generation”⁴⁶ at the end of the ancien régime.⁴⁷ In the following centuries, speculation about the nature of generations, the length of peer cohorts, and their power for social change became common among elite thinkers. Contemporary notions of social generations emerged in the 19^th Century: John Stuart Mill “formally defined a generation as ‘a new set of human beings’ who ‘have been educated, have grown up from childhood, and have taken possession of society;’”⁴⁸ Wilhelm Dilthey explicitly defined the distinction between family lineage and peer cohort generations,⁴⁹ describing the latter as “a relationship of contemporaneity […] between those who had a common childhood, a common adolescence, and whose years of greatest vigor partially overlap;”⁵⁰ Auguste Comte noted that generations have a “unanimous adherence to certain fundamental notions”⁵¹ and argued “generations had become, in the modern world, the master regulator of the pace of social change”⁵² Most theorists said too little or much about why generations were so central, but Comte, Émile Littré and Guiseppe Ferrari were exceptions at this time. They independently developed fourfold model of perpetuating generational cycles, in notable contrast to those which collapsed before restarting as writers of pre-modern historians had observed. This distinction can be likened to “a spiral turn[ing] in a circle while at the same time moving upward – or downward,”⁵³ a synthesis of the two dominant frameworks of time and history, the circle and the line.

Theories on generational cycles began to wane through the twentieth century. Following the horror and devastation of the Great War, “the link between generations and progress seemed like a waste of time”⁵⁴ and a tired subject, intimating long and largely amorphous eras of social time. Rising social thinkers preferred to describe “how each generation creates its own subjective reality, its own psychology, emotions, values, art,”⁵⁵ such as José Ortega y Gasset, who viewed generations as a “dynamic compromise between the mass and the individual;”⁵⁶ his student Julián Mariás, who observed “to ask ourselves to which generation we belong is, in large measure, to ask who we are;”⁵⁷ or philosopher Martin Heidegger who observed, “the fateful act of living in and with one’s generation completes the drama of human existence.”⁵⁸ François Mentré, who coined the term “social generation,” described history as a result of generations “overlapping in time, corrective in purpose, complementary in effect.”⁵⁹

Modern historiographic research asks questions of generational cycles that have no definite answers: “how do they arise? why should they change personality at any particular cohort boundary? and why should they have any particular length?”⁶⁰ As a consequence, generational theory has fallen out of intellectual favor just as it has risen in popular consciousness. No “cohort-group has come fully of age in America without encountering at least one determined attempt to name it”⁶¹ since the 1920s, but generational type’s grand theoretical implications has gone the way of most other all-encompassing theories of the late modern period, “skeptics [now regarding] the cohort generation, like astrology, as a provocative idea searching blindly for a reason,”⁶² useful for demographic analysis but without greater explanatory power.

Cyclical models of history continued to emerge through the 1900s, removed from generational associations and taking “shape as a clearly definable cycle of historical behavior.”⁶³ However, it was not until Strauss and Howe’s work from the 1990s onward that generational models of history returned to public consciousness; Peter Turchin’s cliodynamic models of history likewise center generational overturn as the mechanism of social collapse and progress, first published through the 2000s. In the wake of the 2020 pandemic and both theories highlighting of the year as a pivotal moment, many have begun to reconsider what these cyclical theories of history may offer for understanding humanity.

Theories of Generational Type

To unpack the proposed mechanism of generational cycles, the fourfold annual cycle of seasons will be analogized to the life cycle of the individual and generation in which they play a part, as “the rhythms of social change are reflected in the rhythms of biological and seasonal nature.”⁶⁴ Strauss and Howe likewise divide the life cycle into four parts, referring to various “ancients” producing similar divisions, including Pythagoras who saw “four phases, each roughly twenty years long and each associated with a season”⁶⁵ and the Romans who divided life into phases of “pueritia (childhood), iuventus (young adulthood), virilitas (maturity), and senectus (old age).”⁶⁶ Each phase of life comes with its own distinct opportunities and responsibilities:⁶⁷

In the spring of life, from birth to one’s early twenties, children are dependent on others for protection, nurture, and avoiding harm. As they grow and learn, they are responsible for acquiring competence and absorbing the values of their community at the behest of elders.

In the summer of life, from one’s twenties to early forties, rising adults in the peak of their vitality end their apprenticeships and enter their socioeconomic roles. They are responsible for serving institutions as members of the majority, generating resources and starting families as the muscle and energy of society.

In the autumn of life, from one’s forties to mid-sixties, adults enter midlife and take on more leadership roles through parenting, teaching, and directing institutions. They are responsible for using their acquired values and experience to maintain the community and take on the mantle of power.

In the winter of life, from one’s sixties to mid-eighties, elders enter the role of stewardship for their communities, supervising, mentoring, channeling endowments, and passing on values with the wisdom of old age, taking advantage of the highest leadership posts. Passed this age, late elderhood is most often a return to dependence in which values are remembered but rarely applied.

As described above, most of humanity has experienced little differentiation between the typical experience at each life stage for successive family generations, both parent and progeny occupying the same roles in roughly the same manner. So long as communities have maintained sustainable practices in stable environments, this equilibrium has provided little incentive for radical creativity or originality. As civilization rose and spread, however, so too did kairotic Great Events, such as the founding of new states and religions.

Whether participating in a Great Event themselves or inherit stories of their significance, peer cohorts are defined by these watershed moments: “the same cataclysm that a 10-year-old finds terrifying a 30-year-old may find empowering, a 50-year-old calming, a 70-year-old inspiring;”⁶⁸ “children mirror each other’s dread, youth each other’s valor, midlifers each other’s competence, and seniors each other’s wisdom,”⁶⁹ reinforcing collective attitudes, values, and identity. As life goes on, wave-like fluctuations in social attitudes and behaviors emerge between and through successive Great Events. These in turn further “shape the personalities of different age groups differently according to their phase of life, [who then retain] those personality differences as they grow older."⁷⁰

In youth, circumstances may lead adults towards over- or underprotecting them; in rising adulthood, criminality and drug abuse may be more rampant, and marriage and career opportunities may come easier or harder; power is at times taken sooner in adulthood, other times later; in elderhood, counsel may be readily heeded or haughtily rejected. By analogy, some summers of life may be cooler and wetter, some winters more mild or severe. In short, a generation’s common location in history leads them to have common beliefs and behavior in response to their general shared experiences. There are always exceptions, of course; some values become predominant, others are repressed. Some events catalyze generational cohorts around them while others fade from prominence. In either cases, a range of individuals come to be pulled into a common sense of identity, even if it isn’t embraced by them all.

The rhythmic variations of the social life cycle, if taken as a synchronic snapshot of history, show distinct ‘constellations’ of shared generational experience and attitudes up and down each stages of life, opposed to a universal, invariant life cycle. A recurrence of peer personalities emerges, interlocking, fourfold individual and social cycles in which “everyone who lives a normal lifespan experienc[e] every constellational era once.”⁷¹ In these dynamic social arrangements, ties to familial bonds and traditions are weakened by the vital bonds of those who share a common experience and destiny, whose personal life cycle corresponds with the collective cycle.

Generations are not passive receivers of this shifting social mood, however, but its active creators. It is the “ongoing interplay of peer personalities [that gives] history a dynamic quality. How children are raised affects how they later parent. How youths come of age shapes their later exercise of leadership – which, in turn, substantially defines the coming-of-age experiences of others."⁷² Therefore, the engine of social progress generated by peer cohort generations is not defined by generational tendencies at any particular stage of life but through the retrospective and holistic lens of a its life cycle and its impacts on the generations around it.⁷³ Broadly speaking, each generation’s trajectory aims to compensate for the shortcomings of its own coming-of-age experience for its own children. The desire for a generation “to leave behind a more secure and affluent world than [a generation] inherits” in turn produces its “own unique brand of positive and negative endowments [with] its own special way of helping or hurting the future"⁷⁴ that other generations must, in turn, correct for – a dialectical interplay made most striking across child-parent generations.⁷⁵

Indeed, it is the generation in their youth who are best able to perceive the shadow and shortcomings of their the generation that raises them, who are themselves reacting to the shadow of their parents in late elderhood,⁷⁶ forming an oppositional dynamic between familial lineage and peer cohort generations. For this reason, Strauss and Howe theorize that children and late elders may bond over generational similarities, and that “the most noticeable endowment neglect or reversal is likely to occur in the endowment activity associated with the generation currently passing beyond elderhood,”⁷⁷ as the terminus of their influence on culture creates a void that the young generation must rise to fill. Children are thus inclined towards a life path that mirrors that of their grandparents, as a “generation isn’t like the generation that shaped [it], but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped [it]. Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves.”⁷⁸

When this principle plays out across the generations, “the oscillations within a cycle are greater than the differences across a full cycle,”⁷⁹ analogous to an octave. This Heroclitean dynamic of entiodromia⁸⁰ explains why “the story of civilization seldom moves in a straight line, but is rich with curves, oscillations, and mood shifts. The ebb and flow of history often reflect the ebb and flow of generations.”⁸¹ It regulates the velocity of social change through continual minor readjustment, balancing “between risk and caution, reflection and activity, [and] passion and reason,”⁸² making “the cycle of generations a powerful force for rejuvenation, a balance wheel for human progress.”⁸³

Of course, history shows that the rise of peer cohort generational dynamics is no guarantee of a social cycle’s perpetuity. Historically, social orders have often been dependent on founders and their peer generation; without their hard-fought wisdom or successive generations’ first-hand experience of their efforts, their creations would often not survive their passing. Their grandchild generation may not take up the call to re-establish social foundations. The cycle winds down: no rising generation takes up the call for recreating the social order of those passing, no Great Event arises to catalyze progress, or else it overwhelms the collective, leading to collapse, often four generations from their origins.

At the same time, this is the inevitable risk and opportunity of progress, as the “dynamic of generational aging and dying enables a society to replenish its memory and evolve over time,”⁸⁴ producing the correspondence of individual life cycles and that of the collective, social cycles, both embodied by Strauss and Howe’s preferred Etruscan term, the saeculum. Otherwise, “without human death, memories would never die, and unbroken habits and customs would strangle civilization.”⁸⁵ In turn, society may undergo a rebirth should a novel ‘constellation’ of generations manage to cross the threshold of destiny and revolutionize what came before.⁸⁶

Howe likens this to the general properties of any complex system, as the phase transition and bifurcation point of a Great Event cannot be predicted in advance, nor can its outcome.⁸⁷ This is the risk and opportunity of the “omnipresent balance between order and change [as] the saeculum itself can be regarded as a complex living system that seeks [this out].”⁸⁸

In sum, theories on generational lineage and change may be traced back to the earliest records of human history. Periods of cataclysm, the founding of states or religions, impact members of a social different differently depending on their age. This creates generational differences that may become an engine of cyclical progress, or else collapse and fade back into generational homeostasis. Each subsequent generation emerges in response to the conditions established by others, with its own duties, endowments, and shortcomings to be compensated for by future progeny. As is the case for all complex systems, there is no guarantee of a generational cycle’s perpetuity, but moments of crisis are necessary to catalyze its evolution.

In Part II, we will look at how this theory applies exceptionally well to the United States, and the particular characteristics of the fourfold eras and generations that make up this cycle in American history and the contemporary period.

References

Howe, Neil. (2023). The Fourth Turning is Here. Simon & Schuster.

Strauss, William & Neil Howe. (1991). Generations. William Morrow & Company.

Strauss, William & Neil Howe. (1998). The Fourth Turning. Broadway Books.

Tarnas, Richard. (2007). Cosmos and Psyche. Plume

1. Two supplemental truisms: “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” - Mark Twain (apocryphal) “Those who don’t learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” - George Santayana

2. Tarnas, p. 13.

3. Tarnas, p. 12.

4. Tarnas, p. 15.

5. Tarnas, pp. 14-15.

6. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 12.

7. C-span video: https://www.c-span.org/video/?17548-1/generations-history-americas-future

8. Strauss and Howe formulated their ideas inductively from extant primary and secondary historical texts towards their overarching theory, 1991, p. 17, “Sometimes pouring through many articles or books to confirm an observation covered [...] in less than a sentence.”

9. Strauss & Hower, p. 5.

10. William Strauss on C-Span, 26:04: “The kinds of historians who are drawn to our book -- and I'm sure it will be very controversial among academics because we are presenting something that is so new -- but the kinds who are drawn to it are the ones who themselves have focused on the human life cycle rather than just the sequential series of events. Some good examples of that are Morton Keller up at Brandeis and David Hackett Fischer. These are people who have noticed the power in not just generations, but the shifts that have happened over time in the way Americans have treated children and older people and have tried to link that to the broader currents of history.”

11. As recounted by President Bill Clinton’s aid Dick Morris, in https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/us/politics/coronavirus-republicans-trump.html

12. For example, he has presented at various Pew Research events, including a panel on Millennials available here: https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/03/11/portrait-of-the-millennials/

13. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/us/politics/stephen-bannon-book-fourth-turning.html

14. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 15.

15. Strauss and Howe specify two potential time spans; either 1991, p. 381: “lasting from 2013 to 2024” or p. 382: “2020 to 2029”

16. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/us/politics/coronavirus-republicans-trump.html

17. This essay liberally quotes the authors and their sources with few references to external supplemental research, presenting their ideas with minimal critique.

18. Howe, p. 27.

19. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 8.

20. Howe, p. 29.

21. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 434.

22. This term is used in The Fourth Turning; Generations uses the equivalent term ‘cohort generations.’

23. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 434.

24. Howe, p. 74.

25. The historical veracity of these Greek epics matters less than their endurance; Howe, p. 91: “Details that distinguish between fable and reality tend to fade until what’s left is mostly myth, the raw outline of the archetype itself;” p. 93: “A culture will not elevate an event (or a story) into myth unless it illustrates enduring human tendencies.”

26. Strauss & Howe, 1998, pp. 86-87.

27. Strauss & Howe, p. 433.

28. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 62.

29. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 434.

30. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 87.

31. Howe, p. 68.

32. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 88.

33. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 9.

34. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 26.

35. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 27.

36. Howe, p. 42: “Unusually for an ancient people, the Romans embraced a dynamic and aspirational vision of their imperial destiny. And they were willing to innovate endlessly in its pursuit, assimilating new peoples and borrowing freely from other cultures along the way. The result may have been a very early appearance of the modern cycle of history.”

37. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 27.

38. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 9.

39. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 10.

40. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 9.

41. Howe, p. 31: “Linearism required hundreds of years to catch on, but when it did, it changed the world.”

42. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 34.

43. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 9.

44. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 34: “In romance languages, the word became vulgarized into the derivatives still used today: the Italian secolo, the Spanish siglo, and the French siécle.”

45. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 95.

46. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 438.

47. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 63: “At about the same time that Europeans began to talk self-consciously about centuries, they also began to talk explicitly about peer groups.”

48. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 438, quoting John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1840)

49. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 438.

50. Strauss & Howe,1998, p. 63, quoting Giuseppe Ferrari, Teoria dei periodi politici (1874).

51. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 66, wuoting Auguste Comte, Cours de Philosophie Positive (1869).

52. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 63.

53. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 349.

54. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 439.

55. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 439.

56. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 68, quoting José Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme (1923).

57. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 67, quoting Julián Mariás, Generations: A Historical Method ( trans. 1970/1967)

58. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 69, quoting Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927)

59. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 99.

60. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 440.

61. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 439.

62. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 440.

63. Howe, p. 45.

64. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 20.

65. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 53.

66. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 53.

67. The four phases of life are paraphrased from Generations, p. 60, which uses the age brackets 0-21, 22-43, 44-65, 66-87; and The Fourth Turning, pp. 55-57, which uses the age brackets 0-20, 21-41, 42-62, 63-83. Due to this inconsistency, I chose less specific periods of time.

68. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 48.

69. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 58.

70. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 34.

71. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 351.

72. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 33.

73. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 97: “It never matters as much where a generation is as where it is going.”

74. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 39.

75. Strauss and Howe note that two generations produce most of the offspring at a time, but the elder generation tends to lead the era’s approach to child rearing.

76. Howe, p. 98: “What may be fresh and promising about an emerging archetype in its youth may well seem stale and oppressive after it has fully taken over.”

77. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 372.

78. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 79.

79. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 21.

80. Howe, p. 98: “The tendency of each archetype to trigger its shadow was called enantiodromia by the ancient Greeks. It is the tendency of all natural phenomena, when pushed to their extreme, to give rise to their opposite and thus to preserve an equilibrium across the cycle.”

81. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 39.

82. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 448.

83. Strauss & Howe, 1991, p. 373.

84. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 14.

85. Strauss & Howe, 1998, p. 21.

86. Howe, p. xi: “Our collective social life, as with so many rhythmic systems in nature, requires seasons of sudden change and radical uncertainty in order for us to thrive over time.”

87. Howe, p. 156: “[The saeculum]  has a periodicity that is approximately known in a complex system determined by nonlinear and interactive drivers in a manner that is largely unknown.”

88. Howe, p. 157.