Generations

I. The ConceptJulián Marias

BIBLIOGRAPHY

II. Political GenerationsMarvin Rintala

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I THE CONCEPT

Ever since antiquity, the concept of generation has been held in a biological, and consequently in a genealogical, sense of regular descent of a group of organisms from a progenitor. But since the early nineteenth century there has been developed a social and historical concept of generations as comprising the structure not only of societies but also of history itself. Nevertheless, attempts to formulate a sociological theory of generations in the biological sense of kinship descent have been unproductive because the temporal continuity of births makes impossible any determination of social generations so long as “generation” is understood in a purely biological sense. It is therefore necessary to arrive at a strictly social and historical interpretation of the generation concept in order for it to acquire relevance in the field of the social sciences.

History of the generation concept. Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology, considered the duration of human life a decisive element in determining the velocity of human evolution and therefore the passing of one generation to another, the term of full activity for man being thirty years (1830-1842, pp. 635-639 in part 4 of the 1839 edition). Comte did not deal with the phenomena of individual or simply familial life but with social life based on “the unanimous adhesion to certain fundamental notions” (1851-1854, part 4, p. 679).

John Stuart Mill obtained the concept of social generations from Comte and added further refinements of considerable interest. He argued that in each successive age the “principal phenomena” of society are different, and that the interval which marks these changes most clearly is the generation —that is, the period of time in which a “new set” of individuals reaches maturity and takes possession of society. He believed that each social state is generated not only by the preceding one but also by the whole previous history of humanity; one of the key concepts in understanding this process is that of the generation. “History accordingly does, when judiciously examined, afford Empirical Laws of Society” (Mill [1843] 1961, p. 598).

After this philosophical beginning of the theory of generations, the theory received further development at the hands of statisticians and historians. Antoine Augustin Cournot, the French economist and mathematician, first explicated the fact that epochs succeed themselves in continuity and only historical events give evidence of the articulation of generations: “Through education, each generation transmits to the one immediately following, a certain groundwork of ideas; and while this act of education or transmission is in operation, the educating generation is still present; unexpected, more over, is the influence of the survivors of a preceding generation who have not ceased taking a notable part in the government of the society, on the movement of ideas and affairs” (1872, vol. 1, chapter 8).

Giuseppe Ferrari, Italian historian, politician, and editor of Vico, limited himself to the examination of political history, in which he believed he had discovered that the scene changes every thirty years and that the generation is the decisive ele ment. Starting from this basic premise, he formu lated laws of political succession: “Generations behave according to these principles, and are in turn preparatory, revolutionary, reactionary, and conciliatory” (1874, p. 182).

The German historian Wilhelm Dilthey also found the idea of generation useful for studying the culture of an epoch, and he applied it in many of his writings. In 1875 Dilthey arrived at the notion that the generation is at once a space of time, an internal metrical concept of human life of about thirty years’ duration, and a contemporary relation of individuals to each other.

The relationship between individuals denoted by the term generation is therefore one of simultaneity. We say that certain people belong to “the same generation” when they have, in a certain sense, grown up together, passed through childhood and youth at about the same time, and enjoyed their period of maturity during more or less the same years. It follows, then, that such people are bound together in another, deeper relationship: they also constitute “the same generation” because, in their impressionable years, they have been subject to the same leading influences. ([1875], 1924, vol. 5, p. 37)

The historian Leopold von Ranke and, to a much greater extent, his disciple Ottokar Lorenz put the theme of generations into a historical context from the point of view of periodization. Ranke took the concept of generation in the usual sense of the word. Lorenz took his point of departure from Ranke and from the French psychologist T. A. Ribot, whose studies of heredity were just beginning to appear; he put forward the conception of a scientific history founded on the study of heredity and genealogy. Lorenz was especially interested in the century as a method of dividing history into periods; thus, he defined a generation as the sum of all those who were employed within a given cultural area during one-third of a century.

In the twentieth century an attempt was begun to study history in terms of generations; thus, new refinements were gradually added to the theory. The principal studies are those of Francois Mentre (1920), Karl Mannheim (1928), Engelbert Drerup (1933), Pedro Lain Entralgo (1945), and Julián Marias (1949a; 1955). Attempts were also made to apply the doctrine of generations to particular themes: for example, art (Pinder 1926) and literature (Petersen 1930; Peyre 1948). But the most extensive general contribution, based on a philosophical theory of social life, was made by Jose Ortega y Gasset. His student Julián Marias has continued to write in this tradition.

The reality of generations

In varying degrees, the studies of generations have left in obscurity the questions of what generations are, why they exist, how long they last, what their scope is, and how they are determined. Some attempts have clarified some of these aspects, but in general without sufficient justification. Ortega y Gasset’s theory of human life and, more con cretely, of historical and social life has the merit of dealing with all of these questions. According to Ortega, all purely biological (and therefore genealogical) consideration of human life is insufficient, since human life does not consist in its psycho-physical structures alone, but in what man does with them. Human life is a drama with character, plot, and scenery—the world; and this world is primarily a mass of social interpretations of reality: beliefs, ideas, customs, estimations, etc. These have a life independent of our individual wills; like laws, they stand in force, and we cannot avoid meeting them and having to deal with them. Ortega called them vigencias (states of being in force), giving social value to a juridical term. The world thus is a system of vigencias, or reigning norms, that both permits and compels man to orient himself and live his life (Ferrater Mora [1957] 1963, pp. 46-65; Marias 1949b).

The world system at all times presents the aspect of a determined historical level in which historical-social generations appear:

The changes in vital sensibility which are decisive in history, appear under the form of the generation. A generation is not a handful of outstanding men, nor simply a mass of men; it resembles a new integration of the social body, with its select minority and its gross multitude, launched upon the orbit of existence with a pre-established vital trajectory. The generation is a dynamic compromise between mass and individual, and is the most important conception in history. It is, so to speak, the pivot responsible for the movements of historical evolution. (Ortega [1923] 1961, pp. 14-15)

Thus, a generation is a human variation; every generation manifests a certain vital attitude. Generations are born one after the other, each encountering the forms of the previous one. There are cumulative epochs and others that are eliminatory and polemic.

A distinction must also be made between the contemporary (those who live in the same time) and the coeval (those who are the same age and are, by turns, young, mature, and old together) who constitute a generation (Ortega [1933] 1962, pp. 42-43). Ortega was, of course, well aware of the criticism that, since men are born every day, and since only those born on the same day are of the same age, the concept of generation is an illusion. But he rejected this kind of mathematical exactitude in dealing with the stuff of human life: “Within the human trajectory of life, age is a certain way of living … Age, then, is not a date, but a ’zone of dates’; and it is not only those born in the same year who are the same age in life and in history, but those who are born within a zone of dates” (ibid., p. 47).

Having defined the concept of generation, Ortega went on to consider the problem of applying it to history. Here he made use of the traditional division of human life into five “ages“—childhood, youth, “initiation” (or early manhood), “dominance” (or maturity), and old age. If the complete life-span is set at 75 years, the “ages” or generations of the life-span can be regarded as equal periods of 15 years each. Ortega pointed out that, since history is made largely by men between the ages of 30 and 60, it is the third and fourth generations that are of crucial interest to historians at any one time. But, from the point of view of individual development, these two generations are very different in character: “from thirty to forty-five is the period of gestation, or creation and conflict; from forty-five to sixty, the stage of dominance and command” (ibid., p. 59). Because of their very great difference in outlook, there is always potential or actual conflict between these two generations, and herein Ortega detected the locus of historical change.

There remains the problem of finding a starting point for the generational series: why should any one division of history into 15-year periods be more valid than another? Ortega thought he had solved this problem by introducing the notion of the “decisive generation” he argued that since it was already clear, from independent historical consider ations, which were the crucial years in which a new era came into being, one had only to seek out the individuals who were the most decisive innova tors of that period and note when they entered early manhood. Thus, if we take the Middle Ages as lasting until about 1350, and the modern age as beginning at some time between 1600 and 1650, the late fourteenth and all of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries being a period of transition, the problem, as Ortega saw it, was to find the individual who most decisively represented the emergence of the modern age. In the present case, Ortega decided that that individual was Descartes, who ended his thirtieth year in 1626; thus the key date of the previous generation was 1611, and that of the generation following Descartes was 1641. Not that these dates were hard-and-fast divisions; Ortega intended them only as major reference points: “the center of the zone of dates which corresponds to the decisive generation” (Ortega [1933] 1962, p. 63). Nor did all generations have their great men, although there was a strong presumption that what Ortega called the “tone” of history changed more or less decisively every 15 years.

Ortega did not pretend to have solved the problem of generations in any final sense; what he offered the historian was a series of challenges, of demands to rethink his conception of the past in the light of the generational approach. Indeed, Ortega was not engaged in the writing of history as such; his main interest, so far as history was concerned, was in isolating and defining those periods of crisis and decisive social change which redefine the entire meaning of human existence. Like Wilhelm Dilthey, he continually stressed the importance of studying the meaning of historical events for those who took part in them. His generational schema was thus an indispensable means of detecting regularities in the seemingly endless variation of human experience.

Dynamics of generations

Most of Ortega’s writings were issued as public lectures or newspaper articles, in which forms he excelled. This gives his work great cogency of style but sometimes deters the specialist. A certain amount of systematic elaboration and clarification of his ideas is therefore necessary in order to demonstrate their usefulness to social science and to provide further developments of his method.

The macrostructure of history—epochs—can not be determined a priori or cyclically, because it is dependent not on any constant structural factor of human life, but on its empirical contents. The microstructure—generations—is based on the mechanism of ages that is constant within certain extensive historical limits. Generations are, by turns, the “actors” and the “acts” of the historical drama, the “who” and the “what” of history whose movement is not continual but gradual. The generation is the elemental historical present, the term of relative stability of a world figure, and the rhythm of historical variation. The empirical determination of generations within a society is difficult and requires investigations that are rigorous and extremely cautious. Only the reigning norms of a society and their variation can be analyzed in detail. If a certain number of representative figures are taken whose origins fall within the same 15-year period (though the boundaries of the generations in question are not known, nor are the generations to which these figures belong), we can at least take each individual as representative of his own generation and study its characteristics in him. If other persons born in subsequent 15-year periods are added to the series, we can continue to assume that each group belongs to the same generation. But if, at a certain moment, a change in the whole series is observed, a “boundary” between two generations is indicated, and an entire generational series can then be established, at least in a provisional manner. This hypothetical series can be applied like a framework to historical reality, which will then confirm or correct it. Thus the proposed scale of generations serves as a provisional “working hypothesis” its value is methodological.

Generations are not small groups of illustrious men; the latter are only the representative men of a generation that comprises innumerable anonymous men born within a certain “zone of dates.” If a society is studied from the point of view of generations, it appears to be joined in groups or strata of coevals, each of whom occupies a definite position by virtue of his experiences, his pretensions, and, finally, his social level, since stratification is universal. The generational perspective introduces discontinuity and articulation in place of an amorphous and confused whole. From a historical point of view—inseparable from sociology because society is intrinsically historical—a date “unfolds” itself in several dates that correspond to the different generations. In each date there are four major human strata or generations, coexistents in interaction, with precise and unsubstitutable functions; (a) the “survivors” of a previous epoch who indicate the origins of the present situation, that is, the men “of another time” who nevertheless remain in this one; (b) those in power in all areas, whose pretensions generally coincide with the actual state of the world; (c) the “opposition” or active generation that has not yet triumphed and fights with the previous generation for the transfer of power and the realization of its own innovations; and (d) the young, who have new pretensions and look forward to a “putsch” or downfall of the status quo. A historical epoch is therefore defined by a principle or form of life that differentiates it from the previous one and affects the totality of a society. It is a process by which an innovation that begins by being individual goes on to permeate a minority and finally becomes dominant throughout the entire society, so that it is the form that individuals encounter as the prevailing way of life. Such a process requires the intervention of at least four successive generations, or about sixty years.

Empirical determination of generational series requires considerable work that has not as yet been accomplished anywhere. It is advisable to take a clearly defined society (a nation, for example) and a not too large space of time, since the normal concatenation of generations can be disturbed by serious historical upheavals. Between two different societies there normally is a time lag in the dates of generations. But the fact that different societies often have certain key dates in common is an indication that the same customs, manners, ideas, beliefs, etc. dominate over a certain historical area; in other words, that this constitutes one society, at least on a certain level. For example, it is very probable that the generations of western Europe coincide since the eighteenth century—in our time, perhaps throughout the West. It is certain, on the other hand, that the key dates in the United States are different from those in India or China.

The method of generations would permit a “social cartography” to be arrived at, the difficulties of which would be great but no greater than the requirements for any other empirical investigation of social phenomena. It should be noticed that his torical-social generations affect all the men of a society in all the dimensions of their life; properly speaking, there is no such thing as (for example) a purely “literary” or “political” generation.

Particular fields can, of course, be investigated to obtain a greater facility of comparison or to pursue a particular interest; it must be borne in mind, however, that the results obtained cannot be extended to the whole society but must be related to a general theory of generations.

JuliÁn Marias

[Directly related is the entryCohort Analysis. Other relevant material may be found inHistory, article onthe philosophy of history; Periodization; and in the biographies ofComte; Cournot; Dilthey; Mannheim; Mill; Ortega y Gasset; Ranke; Vico.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benloew, Louis1881 Les lois de I’histoire. Paris: Ger-mer-Bailliere.

Comte, Auguste(1830–1842) 1896 The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Freely translated and condensed by Harriet Martineau, with an introduction by Frederic Harrison. 3 vols. London: Bell. → First published as Cours de philosophic positive.

Comte, Auguste(1851–1854) 1875-1877 System of Positive Polity. 4 vols. London: Longmans. → First published in French. The translation of the extract in the text was made by the encyclopedia ’s editorial staff from the 1851-1854 French edition.

Cournot, Antoine A. (1872) 1934 Considérations sur la marche des idées et des évènements dans les temps modernes. 2 vols. Paris: Boivin.

Croce, Benedetto(1917)1960 History: Its Theory and Practice. New York: Russell. → First published as Teoria e storia della storiografta.

Dilthey, Wilhelm(1875)1924 Uber das Studium der Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen, der Gesellschaft und dem Staat. Pages 31-73 in Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften. Volume 5: Die geistige Welt. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner.

Drerup, Engelbert1933 Das Generationsproblem in der griechischen und griechisch-romischen Kultur. Paderborn (Germany): Schoningh.

Dromel, Justin 1862 La loi des révolutions: Les générations, les nationalités, les dynasties, les religions. Paris: Didier.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. 1956 From Generation to Generation: Age Groups and Social Structure. Glencoe,111.: Free Press; London: Routledge.

Ferrari, Giuseppe1874 Teoria dei periodi politici. Milan (Italy): Hoepli.

Ferrater Mora, Jose(1957) 1963 Ortega y Gasset:An Outline of His Philosophy. New rev. ed. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

Jeschke, Hans1934 Die Generation von 1898 in Spanien. Halle (Germany): Niemeyer.

Lafuente Ferrari, Enrique1951 La fundamentacidn y los problemas de la historia del arte. Madrid: Tecnos.

Latn Entralgo, Pedro1945 Las generaciones en la historia. Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos.

Lorenz, Ottokar1886 Die Geschichtswissenschaft in Hauptrichtungen und Aufgaben kritisch erortert. Ber lin: Hertz.

Lorenz, Ottokar1891 Leopold von Ranke, die Generationslehre und der Geschichtsunterricht. Berlin: Hertz.

Mannheim, Karl(1928) 1952 The Problem of Generations. Pages 276-320 in Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. → First published in German.

Marias, JuliÁn (1949a) 1961 El método histórico de las generaciones. 3d ed. Madrid: Revista de Occidente.

Marias, JuliÁn 1949& Ortega and the Idea of Vital Reason. Dublin Review 222, no. 445:56-79; no. 446:36–54.

Mrias, Jlian (1955) 1964 La estructura social: Teoria y metodo. 4th ed. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones.

[Martine Zruiz, Jose] 1913 Cldsicos y modernos, by Azorin [pseud.]. Madrid: Renacimiento.

MeÉntre, Francois 1920 Les gènèrations sociales. Paris: Bossard.

Mill, John Stuart (1843) 1961 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: Longmans.

Ortega Y Gasset, Jose(1923) 1933 The Modern Theme. New York: Norton. → First published as El tema de nuestro tiempo. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Harper.

Ortega Y Gasset, Jose(1933) 1962 Man and Crisis. New York: Norton. → First published as En torno d Galileo.

Petersen, Julius 1930 Die literarischen Generationen. Pages 130-187 in Emil Ermatinger (editor), Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Junker & Dunnhaupt.

Peyre, Henri 1948 Les generations litteraires. Paris: Boivin.

Pinder, Wilhelm (1926) 1928 Das Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas. 2d ed. Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt.

Ranke, Leopold Von (1888) 1954 Uber die Epochen der neueren Geschichte. Part 9, section 2 in Leopold von Ranke, Weltgeschichte. Leipzig: Duncker & Hum-blot.

Rumelin, Gustav 1875 Uber den Begriff und die Dauer einer Generation. Volume 1, pages 285-304 in Gustav Rumelin, Reden und Aufsatze. Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany): Mohr.

Salinas, Pedro1935 El concepto de generation literaria aplicado a la del 98. Revista de occidente 50:249–259.

Schlegel, Friedrich (1812)1889 Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. London: Bell. → First published as Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur.

Soulavie, Jean-l. G. 1809 Pieces in6dites sur les regnesde Louis XIV, Louis XV et Louis XVI. Paris: Colin.

Wechssler, E. 1929 Davoser Hochschulvortrage und das Problem der Generationen in der Geistesgeschichte. Zeitschrift für franzosischen und englischen Unterricht 28:435–438.

II POLITICAL GENERATIONS

Group consciousness is universally recognized as one of the fundamental elements of political motivation. Individual human beings in every political system seek the security provided by membership in groups. Group consciousness is created by certain basic similarities, and this consciousness in turn creates more homogeneity within the group, a conformity which often leads to common action. Individuals think of themselves as members of a group and therefore act as members of that group. Since the interests of different groups are not always mutually compatible, there is social conflict. Since all individuals have allegiances to more than one group, there is conflict within the individual, who must decide which group is most important to him in given circumstances. In European politics, for instance, there has often been a conflict between national consciousness and class consciousness, which has generally been resolved in favor of the former.

Although political scientists have studied in tensively both national consciousness and class consciousness, they have not explored to any considerable extent another kind of group consciousness, that of belonging to a distinct generation. This omission is surprising, for novelists, cultural and political historians, and sociologists have all used the concept of generation with considerable success. Although Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is the outstanding example of a literary work in which different generations cannot communicate effectively with each other, generational conflict is one of the major themes running through most of world literature. This fact is perhaps responsible for the emphasis which cultural historians have given to the study of different literary, artistic, and musical generations. Sometimes, indeed, cultural historians have seen only the successive alternation of “romantic” and “classical” generations. His torians, among them Ranke, have speculated about the significance of a generations approach to political history. Sociologists, especially Karl Mannheim (1928) and Rudolf Heberle (1951), have emphasized the importance of generational differences in social movements and social change. Political scientists, however, have used political generation as a conceptual tool only in the study of modern totalitarianism. Sigmund Neumann (1939; 1942) convincingly stressed the generational consciousness of National Socialist leaders and followers. Students of Soviet politics have found basic differences, not attributable merely to life cycle differences, between the responses of younger and older generations to the enforcement of conformity within the Soviet Union.

It could be argued that the concept of political generation can be of major assistance in under standing the motivation of leaders and followers in all political systems, not merely those which are totalitarian. Much of the hesitance of political scientists in applying this concept undoubtedly has arisen from uncertainty as to the precise meaning of a generation in politics. A political generation is not to be equated with a biological generation. Political generations do not suddenly “change” every 30 or 35 years. The process of social change is continuous, and it cannot wait until political power is handed on from father to son. There is undoubtedly much personal conflict between fathers and sons, but most of this conflict has no direct political significance. The history of politics is not primarily that of conflict, or even of consensus, between fathers and sons—although such conflict may take place, as it did between James and John Stuart Mill, with important political consequences. There are always—assuming a minimal rate of social change—more than two generations in politics at any one time. The idea of a “young” generation and an “old” generation as the sole participants in the political process is as oversimplified as Karl Marx’s assumption that there are only two classes in modern industrial society. The idea of two generations in politics is frequently linked with the erroneous assumption that the “young” generation is always liberal and the “old” generation is always conservative.

Implicit in a generations approach to politics is the assumption that an individual’s political attitudes do not undergo substantial change during the course of his adult lifetime. Once a set of political beliefs has been embraced, it is regarded as unlikely that the individual will abandon his be liefs. Rather than altering his previous outlook on the basis of new facts, the individual either rejects or accepts these new facts depending on whether or not they are consistent with his previous outlook. In this sense, a “liberal” generation will remain “liberal” in terms of the formative years throughout the physical lifetime of its members. Whether this same political attitude will appear liberal under radically changed circumstances is another matter. Much of the confusion in the political vocabulary of any nation may be due to the different meanings given to the same term by members of different generations. In thus explaining the tenacity of “outmoded” policies, generations theory removes these policies from the realm of free choice, from the realm of moral judgments. In this respect, a generations approach has the same fundamental weaknesses and strengths as any other determinist approach.

Especially in times of rapid social change, it is important to know precisely at what period of life political attitudes are formed. It is interesting that no serious advocate of a generations approach has argued that political attitudes are formed during childhood. Rather, it is argued that late adolescence and early adulthood are the formative years during which a distinctive personal outlook on politics emerges, which remains essentially unchanged through old age. The crucial years are regarded as approximately 17 to 25. If these years are in fact formative, neither the years preceding nor the years following them are decisive in the formation of political attitudes. It is during the formative years that the youth discovers his own identity. When he defines who he is in terms of society, he defines his political outlook as well. A political generation is seen as a group of individuals who have undergone the same basic historical experiences during their formative years. Such a generation would find political communication with earlier and later generations difficult, if not im possible.

The size of a political generation. Not all historical events are experienced to the same degree by the same number of individuals in their formative years, and political generations therefore vary widely in size. The 1825 Decembrist conspiracy, for instance, decisively influenced a much smaller number of young Russians than did the Russian Revolution of 1917. Assuming that the total degree of political participation is stable, it is the temporal and spatial “limits” of a given historic event that define the size of the resulting political generation, just as the degree of uniqueness of that event determines the degree of difficulty that generation will have in communicating with earlier and later generations. In this sense, for instance, the political generation created by World War i was a general European phenomenon. It was neither world-wide nor confined to one or a few European nations. The enormous transformation of European society which the war involved meant that a new political generation was created throughout Europe. But the limited nature of the war experience outside Europe meant that the war had far less impact on, say, American or Japanese youth. Those Europeans whose formative years, in whole or in part, occurred during 1914-1918, especially those who actually fought in the war, were not all influenced in the same way; but they were nevertheless all decisively influenced by it. Their reactions to the war were often very different, depending upon their national, class, and, especially, personality differences. In a real sense, the fact that they were all involved in the war in their formative years determined their attitude toward politics for the rest of their lives. Some never recovered from the war and retreated from politics, which had, they felt, led directly to such suffering. Others entered politics after 1918 determined above all to prevent a recurrence of war. Still others never spiritually left the battlefield and as a result engaged in politics as the continuation of war by other means. These three alternatives formed what Karl Mannheim termed “generation units,” which together constituted a generation precisely because they were oriented toward one another, if only to fight one another. Politics involves more than knowledge of friend and foe, but many of the personal friendships and enmities which in fact later influence political behavior originate during the formative years. Each generation speaks out with more than one voice—there is conflict within each generation as well as among generations.

The time span of a political generation. If a political generation is not the same as a biological generation, it becomes all the more important to define the specific time span within which all who experience their formative years can be said to be molded into one distinct political generation. Without such a definition, it is impossible to classify individuals as members of one or another political generation with any precision, especially since few significant historic events “begin” and “end” with as much definiteness as World War i. Such classification cannot be done on an ad hoc basis. If the ad hoc method is attempted, it may properly be suspected that generational differences are being used as a deus exmachina in much the same way that differences in national character are sometimes invoked when there seems to be no other explanation of some political phenomenon. On the other hand, since the concept of political generation is closely related to the process of social change, any arbitrary choice of time span is likely to violate the complexity of reality. The actual time span involved in a generation will differ substantially in periods in which the process of social change is more rapid or less rapid. Karl Mannheim (1928) suggested that whether a new generation appears every year, every thirty years, or every hundred years, or whether it emerges rhythmically at all, depends entirely on the specific social context. This variability, of course, is merely one aspect of the general problem of applying ideal types to concrete situations. All concepts of comparative analysis must be defined in time and space if they are to be of any use in clarifying reality. This is especially true of the concept of political generation, since membership in the same generation involves common location in time and space. In twentieth-century Western society, in which social change is not only rapid but cataclysmic, the time span of a political generation is considerably shorter than in more stable societies. The most reasonable estimate for the time span of a political generation in twentieth-century Western society is probably ten to fifteen years. In twentieth-century non-Western societies experiencing revolutionary social, economic, and political changes, this time span may be even shorter.

The spatial span of a political generation. Although the spatial span of a political generation is difficult to define with precision, it is clear that many coevals in the human race are not members of the same generation. Those whose formative experiences are fundamentally different cannot be members of the same generation, even though they may coexist in time. There was, for instance, as Mannheim pointed out, no community of experience between youths in China and Germany about 1800. It could be argued that there is considerable community of experience between youths in East Germany and Communist China today, since their formative years are spent in similar totalitarian political environments. Indeed, such phenomena as the spread of nationalism and of industrialization indicate that the spatial barriers between generations may be breaking down, at the same time that more rapid social change is increasing the importance of the temporal barriers between generations. The effect of the latter development is to make communication between different political generations more difficult, while the effect of the former development is to increase the world-wide significance of this decline in ability to communicate. The implications of these long-range developments for meaningful communication within and among political systems are not entirely encouraging.

Significance of the concept. Generational consciousness is undoubtedly less significant as a source of political motivation than either national or class consciousness. National consciousness finds its organizational expression in national states, and class consciousness finds its organizational expresion in class-based private associations and parties. There is no analogous organizational structure cre ated by generational consciousness, except for occasional loosely knit groups such as “Young Turks,” “Young England,” or “Young Conservatives.” There are many powerful men recognized as primarily national or class leaders, but there are relatively few such men recognized as primarily generational leaders. Political personages nevertheless write, as did one Canadian leader, autobiog raphies with such titles as My Generation of Politics and Politicians (Preston 1927). Indeed, perhaps the most impressive evidence for the existence of generational consciousness in politics is the frequency with which it is articulated in the autobiographical writings of political leaders. These writings often demonstrate that, as Leon Blum put it, “a man remains essentially what his youth has made him” and that there is a special kind of communication, in politics as in other aspects of life, between members of the same generation. This should not be surprising, for the latter are simultaneously experiencing the problems and the promise of the life cycle itself.

Problems for further research. Clearly generational consciousness is not the single key to understanding political motivation, but equally clearly there is enough evidence of its importance to justify further research efforts. An exact evaluation of this importance waits upon full answers to several questions, some of which have their implications for the social sciences in general:

(1) When do an individual’s politically formative years begin and end? To what extent is this period different in different societies?

(2) How substantial is the continuity between political attitudes accepted during the formative years and political attitudes in later years? (Care should be taken not to concentrate exclusively in this research on any one single element of political action, such as voting behavior, for the same fun damental attitudes might cause a voter to shift party allegiance in a changing party constellation. In the United States, for instance, an individual who became a Wilsonian liberal in his formative years might consider himself consistent in voting for Republican candidates in elections after the Democratic party was transformed under Franklin Roosevelt. A supporter of the Congress party at the achievement of Indian independence might in later decades feel that his continuing personal beliefs were best articulated by some other—or by no— party.)

(3) How long is the time span necessary to form a distinct political generation? What is the relationship between the rate of social change— and changes in the rate of social change—and the length of this time span?

(4) What is a generation unit? To what extent do generation units see the totality of politics in terms of each other?

Marvin Rintala

[See alsoIdentification, Political. Other relevant material may be found inCohort Analysis; So Cialization; and in the biography ofMannheim.]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Edgar(1956) 1957 The Dilemma: The Generations’ Problem. Pages 33-42 in Edgar Alex ander, Adenauer and the New Germany: The Chan cellor of the Vanquished. Preface by Alvln Johnson. New York: Farrar, Straus. → First published in German.

Bauer, RaymondA.; Inkeles, Alex;and Kluckhohn, Clyde 1956 Generational Differences. Pages 190-198 in Raymond A. Bauer et al., How the Soviet System Works: Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Unjv. Press. → A paper back edition was published in 1961 by Vintage.

Eisenstadt, ShmuelN. 1956 From Generation to Gen eration: Age Groups and Social Structure. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press; London: Routledge.

Evan, William M. 1959 Cohort Analysis of Survey Data: A Procedure for Studying Long-term Opinion Change. Public Opinion Quarterly 23:63–72.

Gusfield, Joseph R. 1957 The Problem of Generations in an Organizational Structure. Social Forces 35:323— 330.

Halpern, Ben1961 The Idea of the Jewish State. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Heberle, Rudolf 1951 Social Movements: An Intro duction to Political Sociology. New York: Appleton. → See especially pages 118-127 on “The Problem of Political Generations.”

Mannheim, Karl (1928) 1952 The Problem of Generations. Pages 276-320 in Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. → First published in German.

Neumann, Sigmund 1939 The Conflict of Generations in Contemporary Europe: From Versailles to Munich. Vital Speeches of the Day 5:623–628.

Neumann, Sigmund (1942) 1965 Permanent Revolution: Totalitarianism in the Age of International Civil War. 2d ed. New York: Praeger. → First published as Permanent Revolution: The Total State in a World at War.

Ortega Y Gasset, Jose(1923) 1933 The Modern Theme. New York: Norton. → First published as El tema de nuestro tiempo. A paperback edition was published in 1961 by Harper.

Pinder, Wilhelm 1926 Kunstgeschichte nach Generationen. Leipzig: Pfeiffer.

Preston, William T. R. 1927 My Generation of Politics and Politicians. Toronto: Rose.

Rintala, Marvin 1958 The Problem of Generations in Finnish Communism. American Slavic and East Euro pean Review 17:190–202.

Rintala, Marvin 1962 Three Generations: The Extreme Right Wing in Finnish Politics. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press.

Rintala, Marvin 1963 A Generation in Politics: A Definition. Review of Politics 25:509–522.

Zeitlin, Maurice 1966 Political Generations in the Cuban Working Class. American Journal of Sociology 71:493–508.

generations of computers. An informal system of classifying computer systems as advances have been made in electronic technology and, latterly, in software. Since the design of digital computers has been a continuous process more than five decades – by a wide variety of people in different countries, faced with different problems – it is difficult and not very profitable to try and establish where ‘generations’ start and finish. See first generation, second generation, third generation, fourth generation, fifth generation.