In their book Generations, William Strauss and Neil Howe introduce a fascinating theory that interprets U.S. history in terms of a repeating series of four basic types of generations.¹ Generations create history and history creates generations. In their followup work, The Fourth Turning, they propose that history moves in long cycles, each four generations long, which they call the saeculum, after the ancient Etruscan cycle of similar length.² The saeculum contains four periods, called turnings, each of which is associated with the birth dates for a particular type of generation.

Examples of how generations affect one's world view (and the actions taken) abound. Thirty years ago it was assumed that people tended to be politically liberal when young and gradually grow more conservative as they age. This idea explained the facts at that time of liberal youth and conservative elders. Yet by the 1990's the situation had reversed, elders tended to be more liberal than young people. The 1980's sitcom Family Ties humorously underlined this trend with the young arch-conservative Alex Keaton and his liberal parents.

It so happens that one's political views do not necessarily change all that much. Today's young adults, what is called Generation X, have a collective outlook on life that is more conservative than that of the previous generation at like age. This conservative outlook is part of what Strauss and Howe call the peer personality of a generation. Generations with similar peer personalities will share beliefs and behavior patterns. For example, the Lost generation, born at the end of the nineteenth century, and Generation X have similar peer personalities, making them the same type of generation. The Lost were the conservative elders of my childhood, who tended to be conservative not because they were old, but because they had always been conservative. Similarly, today's older people are more liberal because, like Alex Keaton's parents, they have always been that way. Strauss and Howe would argue that the move towards the political right over the last couple of decades, and the liberal era before then, reflect the impact of different combinations of generations occupying the adult stages of life.

Another example of the effect of changing generational membership is the decline in the sense of community in America over the last several decades. In his intriguing Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam proposes that the gradual replacement of a civic-minded pre-war generation with more individualistic baby boomers is responsible for about half of this decline. In a particularly striking figure, Putnam documents downward trends in eight measures of Civic engagement by birth year.³ For seven of the eight measures, the decline either begins or accelerates in the late 1920's to early 1930's period. People born after the early 1930's are less active in their community than those born before, and this trend towards less engagement accelerates with more recent birth years. Strauss and Howe would explain the trends Putnam describes as the result of the succession of generations having peer personalities characterized by decreasing civic-orientation. Their GI generation (b 1901-24) has a peer personality of a particularly civic-minded type. In contrast to the GI's are the Boomers and Generation X, which both have highly individualistic peer personalities.

The peer personality of a particular generation is shaped by the generation's historical location relative to a social moment. A social moment is an era, typically lasting about a decade, when people perceive that historical events are radically altering their social environment. Thus, a generation's peer personality (what makes it a particular kind of generation) depends on when they were born relative to particularly eventful periods in history. There are two types of social moments: secular crises, when society focuses on reordering the outer world of institutions and public behavior; and spiritual awakenings, when society focuses on changing the inner world of values and private behavior.

What constitutes the saeculum is the regularly repeating series of social moments. If social moments occurred sporadically, a regular series of generations would not be created and there would be no saeculum. Strauss and Howe list six spiritual awakenings and five secular crises (Table 1) spaced 88 years apart on average as their primary evidence for the existence of regularly spaced social moments. They propose generations reflect the experience of living through a social moment at a particular phase of life. The phases of life are youth (age 0-21), rising adulthood (age 22-43), maturity (age 44-65) and elderhood (age 66-87). They are 22 years in length and four of them comprise an 88-year saeculum, which neatly dovetails with the average spacing of social moments of the same type.

Table 1. Social moments in American history

The last three secular crises in Table 1 are easily recognized as momentous times in American history; it is self evident that they constitute secular crises. The two before them are not so clear. Why, for example, isn't the English Civil War included with the American Revolution and Civil War as secular crises? Author Kevin Phillips does just this in his monumental Cousin's Wars.⁴ Phillips contends that the three great civil conflicts of modern Anglo–American history exerted an enormous influence in shaping nearly every aspect of American and British life. That is, they are secular crises.

The situation for spiritual awakenings is even more problematic. The spiritual awakenings in Table 1 roughly correspond to periods of religious fervor identified by historian William McLoughlin in his book Revivals, Awakenings and Reform.⁵ McLoughlin defines awakenings as periods of cultural revitalization caused by a crisis in beliefs and values that produces a reorientation in those values and beliefs. He identifies awakenings in 1610-40, 1730-60, 1800-30, and 1890-1920.⁶ Comparison of these dates with those for spiritual awakenings in Table 1 shows a rough correspondence. The spiritual awakenings are subsets of the McLoughlin periods and tend to be located midway between secular crises so that a regular pattern of alternating social moments is evident.

Table 2 illustrates this by comparing Strauss and Howe social moment turnings (the period of generational length that encompass social moments) with McLoughlin's awakenings. The Strauss and Howe Awakening turnings are located 16-27 years from the nearest secular crisis with an average spacing of 23 years, close to their standard 22 year generation. In contrast, McLoughlin's dates are located 6-35 years from the nearest secular crisis and can hardly be said to be spaced a generation apart from crisis eras. That is, a saeculum defined by McLoughlin Awakenings isn't very regular, suggesting that such a regular cycle may not exist, or at least cannot be revealed by a survey of history.

Table 2. The spacing of spiritual awakenings relative to crises for two authors

Strauss and Howe do not claim to have identified their saeculum from consideration of cyclical history, however. They define the saeculum in terms of the discrete generations being born at regular intervals. Typically, turnings follow the corresponding generation by about three years. Generations are clusters of contiguous birth cohorts that have similar cohort-group biographies. A birth cohort is simply all people born in a particular year. A cohort-group biography tells the story of the collective experiences of a group of people born at about the same time during each stage of their life.

A good example of a cohort biography is Gail Sheehy's Passages.⁷ Sheehy describes a series of common mileposts such as "doing what we should" in our 20's (getting married and starting our careers) and then experiencing a mid-life crisis around age 40 when the reality of our lives does not comport with the aspirations and goals we set in our twenties. This description of life has a ring of truth for those born in the late 1920's through early 1940's (Sheehy's generation). For those born in the later 40's and afterward (Baby Boomers) it doesn't seem to apply. Most Boomers were still single and in the process of finding out what they wanted to do with their lives at an age when, according to Sheehy's schedule, they should be already married with kids. Many Boomers at age 40 had young families and did not feel anything like a mid-life crisis. Strauss and Howe point out that what Sheehy's book describes are the experiences of those in her generation (the Silent), that is, it is a cohort-group biography of the Silent generation.

Strauss and Howe mention a number of other cohort biographies such as Erik Erikson's "Eight Ages of Man" in his book Childhood and Society, which mostly deals with members of the GI generation,⁸ or Ellen Lagemann's A Generation of Women, that deals with women from the Missionary generation.⁹ They also describe that one can construct a generational biography of, say people born in the 1830's, by reading books describing childhood in the 1830's and 1840's, young adulthood in the 1850's and 1860's, a conventional history of the 1870's and 1880's to describe mid-aged life and a book on old age from around the turn of the century. By carefully building up cohort biographies for people born at various times over the past several hundred years and then grouping similar biographies into generational groups, Strauss and Howe gradually built up their generational scheme and system of turnings. As one goes further and further back it becomes increasingly difficult to construct cohort biographies. In Generations they went back to the Puritan generation (1588-1617). In The Fourth Turning they went back six more generations to the Arthurian generation (1433-1459). Before that they posit that generations do not exist.

Therefore, Strauss and Howe identified their saeculum by exhaustive study of biographical information--not cyclically repeating events in history. The list of generations and derived turnings identified by Strauss and Howe (Table 3) can be considered as raw data providing evidence for the reality of cyclical history--provided they performed a rigorous study. For the purposes of this book, I will assume they did.

Table 3. List of historical turnings and generations according to Strauss and Howe²

Table 3 presents the Strauss and Howe turnings and the generations from which they were obtained. The correspondence between generation types and turning types is shown. Two of the turnings are associated with the social moments I already discussed. These are the Awakening and Crisis, which refer to the spiritual awakening and secular crisis, respectively. Two other turnings, the Unraveling and the High, separate the social moments. It is the existence and regular length of these turnings that create the regular spacing of the social moments that defines the saeculum as a cycle.

If the saeculum only applies to a repeating series of generations that requires exhaustive analysis of biographies to even see, of what use is the concept? Strauss and Howe imply that their cycle can be used to make predictions of the future; the subtitle of their introductory work is "the history of America's future". To do this, they need a correlation between their biographically-determined generations and turnings and the historical trends and developments that are the stuff of history. In their generational biographies in Generations Strauss and Howe refer to various social trends appearing at certain times, but they do not present many explicit correlations between generations and historical trends.

Without such correlations the relevance of the saeculum is less clear. If I take a narrow view and consider the saeculum as solely a cycle of successive generational types, it will be impossible to verify the validity of the saeculum without undertaking a biographical study of my own. It would also be difficult to make predictions because it would not be clear what sort of historical events are associated with generations. On the other hand, if I take an expansive view of the saeculum and claim it has something to do with external socioeconomic, political or cultural trends and not just biographies, then it should be possible to test whether or not the saeculum correlates with any historical trends. If this can be achieved, it would serve as a validation of the saeculum as a genuine historical cycle, which could, in principle, be used for forecasting.