The study of generations is the study of a series of interactions, all of which occur at once. It involves relations between individual and family, between biology and society, between culture, social structures, and historical events; it is shaped by time and place, and given meaning through the context in which it occurs. No wonder the concept of generation has been redefined throughout history; no wonder its meaning remains continually contested. And little surprise that attempts to define and make sociological sense of generations often, as Philip Abrams observed, âend up either as genealogy (the history of fathers and sons in particular families) or as waffleâ (Abrams 1970, p. 176).
Almost one hundred years ago, the sociologist Karl Mannheim sought to make sense of âThe Problem of Generationsâ in a way that embraced the very difficulties involved in the study of this phenomenon. The sociological significance of generations, contended Mannheim, could not be comprehended through a focus either on their quantitative existence or their qualitative experience: the sociology of generations is neither a question of numbers nor the introspective study of everyday life. What matters is the interaction between ânew participants in the cultural processâ (Mannheim 1952, p. 292) and the society in which these participants are born, develop, and transform their world. In this respect, the problem of generations is the problem of knowledge: how we, as a society, ensure that the world lives on through those whom we leave behind.
Mannheimâs was not the first or only attempt to theorise generations from a sociological perspective. Indeed, the first part of his essay grapples with the ideas put forward by other thinkers, from both the positivist and the romantic-historical traditions, and draws from these approaches the elements synthesised in his own formulation of the problem. Since Mannheim, there have been other important developments in the study of generations and the sociology of knowledge. These later approaches, briefly considered below, both extend and challenge Mannheimâs approach, attempting to find ways of studying empirically the experience of generations, and accounting for social and cultural changes that affect the way that the problem of generations is framed and understood.
There is no scope, in this short book, to do justice to the wealth of literature that has contributed to the field over the past century, and what follows is not an attempt to synthesise all these developments. Rather, the aim is to draw out some specifically new directions and challenges that arise when we examine the problem of generations in the context of Anglo-American societies today. Generations are defined, here, neither in the narrow cohort sense (a group of people born around the same time) nor by the more individualised life course approach, but, following Mannheim, as historical, or social, generations, whose self-definition is forged by the circumstances in which they come as age. As such, we see the problem of generations as a problem of knowledgeâhow societyâs accumulated cultural heritage is transmitted from generation to generation at a time when the status both of knowledge itself, and those charged with passing it on, stands in question.
Features of the Problem of Generations Today
The period between the two world wars of the twentieth century highlighted the problem of generations as a bloody, and starkly polarised, reality in Europe. The disillusionment of the âGeneration of 1914â and the rise of the German Youth Movement, in the context of economic turmoil, cultural decadence, and intense and organised class conflict, threw into question assumptions about established truths and the enduring value of the âold waysâ (Gillis 1973; Karl 1970; Laqueur 1962; Mannheim 1952; Wohl 2009). This conflictâof politics, ideologies, and belief systemsâpermeated the existence and experience of those people living through the times.
Mannheimâs distinctive contribution was to formulate an understanding of the emergence and operation of generational consciousness, during times of accelerated social change. In the following chapters, we discuss in more detail the process by which knowledge is transmitted, and the integration of generational location with the experience of wider social and historical events. Here, we consider some reasons why Mannheim saw the study of generations as important in the 1920s, and why this should remain the case today.
History and Biography
C. Wright Mills, writing in 1959, promulgated the sociological imagination as a way of thinking that âenables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within societyâ. The âfirst fruit of this imaginationâ, he wrote, âis the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstancesâ (Mills 1970, p. 12).
For Mannheim, the importance of generations lay similarly within their temporal locationâa group of people born during the same historical period and in the same geographical location, who would interact with the same social forces and events. However, he insisted, they would not experience or shape these forces in the same ways: oneâs generational location is only part of a broader life story, which is given meaning by other social, cultural, and familial factors. An individualâs social, or class, location was the closest analogy to generational location: one does not choose the social class into which one is born, and it has a powerful effect on the way in which one knows, experiences, and shapes the world (Mannheim 1952).
In drawing comparisons with class location to elucidate his theory of generations, Mannheim did not imply that generation was the more significant. Indeed the interwar period was marked by a heightened consciousness of social class and national identity, certainly by comparison with any subsequent epochs, and these had a significant impact on individualsâ identity and the mobilisation of agency. But the very features of this time that gave rise to class consciousness, and national consciousnessârapid social change, a schism between the ideas and values of the past and present, the collective shock brought about by a long, bloody, and traumatic world warâalso gave rise to a distinctive generational consciousness.
The âGeneration of 1914â, according to Wohl, comprised âwanderers between two worldsâ: the traditions of the past and the uncertain present in which the young veterans of the Great War found themselves. His inspiration for this phrase derives from Aldous Huxley, writing in 1942:
I was born wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born, and have made, in a curious way, the worst of both. (Letters of Aldous Huxley. Cited in Wohl 2009, p. 203)
Huxley, in turn, seems to recall Hamletâs anguished plaint: âThe time is out of joint. O cursĂšd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!â (Shakespeare 1993 [c. 1600], p. 878). The experience of time out of joint, of a schism between the past and an uncertain present, is not new. Yet to experience such a schism in terms that are self-consciously generational is generally understood to be a relatively modern phenomenon, which is linked with the development of industrial society, and with this the development of collective experience and agency. In this sense, Wohl explains, we could see generational consciousness as âone of the side effects of the coming of mass societyâ:
It was, like the concept of class, a form of collectivism and determinism, but one that emphasized temporal rather than socioeconomic location. (Wohl 2009, p. 207)
The extent to which individuals make sense of their experiences in generational terms, rather than (or as well as) in terms of social class, personal identity, or political outlook, is one of the enduring debates within the sociology of generations. As I discuss in a previous study (Bristow 2015), there was a sentiment in the second half of the twentieth century that the waning of class consciousness and solidarity might result in the mobilisation of politics based on age (Abrams 1970; Goertzel 1972), as part of a general turn towards the politics of status and, later, identity. The policy discourse in the USA and Britain today is replete with claims about âintergenerational justiceâ, premised on the assumption that there are conflicts of interest between different age groups, which lend themselves to political action (Walker 1996; White 2013).
However, the extent to which different age groups do experience their problems in terms of a âgeneration warâ remains open to question and debate. Indeed, Mannheimâs approach would imply that generational consciousness develops because of a wider sense of collective agency, rather than as a substitute for it. Below, we suggest that in recent decades the label of generation has tended to be applied from above, rather than emerging from the actions of particular, âactiveâ, or âstrategicâ (Edmunds and Turner 2002a) generations themselves.
Continuity and Change
Marxâs famous passage on the making of history, published in 1852, emphasised the extent to which the agency of the present is constrained and shaped by the past:
Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand. The tradition of all past generations weighs like an alp on the brain of the living. At the very time when men appear engaged in revolutionizing things and themselves, in bringing about what never was before, at such very epochs of revolutionary crisis do they anxiously conjure up into their service the spirits of the past, assume their names, their battle cries, their costumes to enact a new historic scene in such time-honored disguise and with such borrowed language. (Marx 2011 [1852], p. 1)
As the times move on, and the present is created, the tradition of the past is assimilated and transcended. âThus does the beginner, who has acquired a new language, keep on translating it back into his own mother tongue; only then has he grasped the spirit of the new language and is able freely to express himself therewith when he moves in it w...