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William Strauss

The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy - What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny Paperback – December 29, 1997

by William Strauss (Author), Neil Howe (Author)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A startling vision of what the cycles of history predict for the future.”—USA Weekend

William Strauss and Neil Howe will change the way you see the world—and your place in it. With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America’s past will predict its future.

Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four eras—or "turnings"—that last about twenty years and that always arrive in the same order. In The Fourth Turning, the authors illustrate these cycles using a brilliant analysis of the post-World War II period.

First comes a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order takes root after the old has been swept away. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion against the now-established order. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis—the Fourth Turning—when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. Together, the four turnings comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth.

The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for America’s next rendezvous with destiny.

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400 pages
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English
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Crown
Publication date

December 29, 1997
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6.09 x 1.01 x 9.19 inches
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0767900464
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978-0767900461
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.
Highlighted by 2,772 Kindle readers
A Prophet generation is born during a High. A Nomad generation is born during an Awakening. A Hero generation is born during an Unraveling. An Artist generation is born during a Crisis.
Highlighted by 2,695 Kindle readers
Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.
Highlighted by 2,684 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

A remarkably bold theory of four “turnings” that help us dissect history

Editorial Reviews

Review

"I put down The Fourth Turning with a mixture of terror and excitement....If Strauss and Howe are right, they will take their place among the great American prophets."
--David Kaiser, Boston Globe

"One of the best efforts to give us an integrated vision of where we
are going."
--Wall Street Journal

"A startling vision of what the cycles of history predict for the future."
--USA Weekend

From the Back Cover

he postwar High, then the Awakening of the '60s and '70s, and now the Unraveling. This audacious and provocative book tells us what to expect just beyond the start of the next century. Are you ready for the Fourth Turning?

Strauss and Howe will change the way you see the world--and your place in it. In The Fourth Turning, they apply their generational theories to the cycles of history and locate America in the middle of an unraveling period, on the brink of a crisis. How you prepare for this crisis--the Fourth Turning--is intimately connected to the mood and attitude of your particular generation. Are you one of the can-do "GI generation," who triumphed in the last crisis? Do you belong to the mediating "Silent Majority," who enjoyed the 1950s High? Do you fall into the "awakened" Boomer category of the 1970s and 1980s, or are you a Gen-Xer struggling to adapt to our spl

About the Author

William Strauss and Neil Howe, the authors of Generations: The History of America's Future and 13th-GEN, write and lecture frequently on generational issues. Strauss is the cofounder and director of the Capitol Steps, a political cabaret. Howe, a historian and economist, is a senior advisor for the Concord Coalition. They both live in the Washington, D.C., area.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Winter Comes Again

America feels like it's unraveling.

Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.

Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of the business cycle can buoy our public spirit.  The Cold War and New Deal struggles are plainly over, but we are of no mind to bask in their successes.  The America of today feels worse, in its fundamentals, than the one many of us remember from youth, a society presided over by those of supposedly lesser consciousness.  Wherever we look, from L.A.  to D.C., from Oklahoma City to Sun City, we see paths to a foreboding future.  We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses.  We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves.  Small wonder that each new election brings a new jolt, its aftermath a new disappointment.

Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts.  Now, it is less.  Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals.  Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person?  Today, more than six in ten say yes.  Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as individually entitled.

Yet even while we exalt our own personal growth, we realize that millions of self-actualized persons don't add up to an actualized society.  Popular trust in virtually every American institution--from businesses and governments to churches and newspapers--keeps falling to new lows.  Public debts soar, the middle class shrinks, welfare dependencies deepen, and cultural arguments worsen by the year.  We now have the highest incarceration rate and the lowest eligible-voter participation rate of any major democracy.  Statistics inform us that many adverse trends (crime, divorce, abortion, scholastic aptitudes) may have bottomed out, but we're not reassured.

Optimism still attaches to self, but no longer to family or community.  Most Americans express more hope for their own prospects than for their children's--or the nation's.  Parents widely fear that the American Dream, which was there (solidly) for their parents and still there (barely) for them, will not be there for their kids.  Young householders are reaching their midthirties never having known a time when America seemed to be on the right track.  Middle-aged people look at their thin savings accounts and slim-to-none pensions, scoff at an illusory Social Security trust fund, and try not to dwell on what a burden their old age could become.  Seniors separate into their own Leisure World, recoiling at the lost virtue of youth while trying not to think about the future.

We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik's Cube.  Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum.  To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can't do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that's impossible unless we fix crime.  There's no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever.  People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted--but that's an awareness we suppress.  As a nation, we're in deep denial.

While we grope for answers, we wonder if analysis may be crowding out our intuition.  Like the anxious patient who takes seventeen kinds of medicine while poring over his own CAT scan, we find it hard to stop and ask, What is the underlying malady really about?  How can we best bring the primal forces of nature to our assistance?  Isn't there a choice lying somewhere between total control and total despair?  Deep down, beneath the tangle of trend lines, we suspect that our history or biology or very humanity must have something simple and important to say to us.  But we don't know what it is.  If we once did know, we have since forgotten.

Wherever we're headed, America is evolving in ways most of us don't like or understand.  Individually focused yet collectively adrift, we wonder if we're heading toward a waterfall.

Are we?

It's All Happened Before

The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience.

In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern: Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era--a new turning--every two decades or so.  At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future.  Turnings come in cycles of four.  Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum.  Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.

The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.

The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.

The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood.  Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.

In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies.  As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent.  But that's what happened.

The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s.  Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before.  But that's what happened.

The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan's mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now.  Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay.  But that's where we are.

Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened?  Yes--many times.  Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling?  Yes--many times, over the centuries.

People in their eighties can remember an earlier mood that was much like today's.  They can recall the years between Armistice Day (1918) and the Great Crash of 1929.  Euphoria over a global military triumph was painfully short-lived.  Earlier optimism about a progressive future gave way to a jazz-age nihilism and a pervasive cynicism about high ideals.  Bosses swaggered in immigrant ghettos, the KKK in the South, the mafia in the industrial heartland, and defenders of Americanism in myriad Middletowns.  Unions atrophied, government weakened, third-parties were the rage, and a dynamic marketplace ushered in new consumer technologies (autos, radios, phones, jukeboxes, vending machines) that made life feel newly complicated and frenetic.  The risky pleasures of a "lost" young generation shocked middle-aged decency crusaders--many of them "tired radicals" who were then moralizing against the detritus of the "mauve decade" of their youth (the 1890s).  Opinions polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like drugs, family, and "decency."  Meanwhile, parents strove to protect a scoutlike new generation of children (who aged into today's senior citizens).

Back then, the details were different, but the underlying mood resembled what Americans feel today.  Listen to Walter Lippmann, writing during World War I:

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being.  There isn't a human relation, whether of parent or child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation.  We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared.  There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that was not meant for a simpler age.

Move backward again to an era recalled by the oldest Americans still alive when today's seniors were little children.  In the late 1840s and early 1850s, America drifted into a foul new mood.  The hugely popular Mexican War had just ended in a stirring triumph, but the huzzahs over territorial gain didn't last long.  Cities grew mean and politics hateful.  Immigration surged, financial speculation boomed, and railroads and cotton exports released powerful new market forces that destabilized communities.  Having run out of answers, the two major parties (Whigs and Democrats) were slowly disintegrating.  A righteous debate over slavery's westward expansion erupted between so-called Southrons and abolitionists--many of them middle-aged spiritualists who in the more euphoric 1830s and 1840s had dabbled in Transcendentalism, utopian communes, and other assorted youth-fired crusades.  Colleges went begging for students as a brazen young generation hustled west to pan for gold in towns fabled for their violence.  Meanwhile, a child generation grew up with a new regimentation that startled European visitors who, a decade earlier, had bemoaned the wildness of American kids.  Sound familiar?

Run the clock back the length of yet another long life, to the 1760s.  The recent favorable conclusion to the French and Indian War had brought eighty years of conflict to a close and secured the colonial frontier.  Yet when England tried to recoup the expense of the war through taxation, the colonies seethed with a directionless discontent.  Immigration from the Old World, emigration across the Appalachians, and colonial trade arguments all rose sharply.  As debtors' prisons bulged, middle-aged people complained of what Benjamin Franklin called the "white savagery" of youth.  Middle-aged orators (peers of the fiery young preachers of the circa-1740 Great Awakening) summoned civic consciousness and organized popular crusades of economic austerity.  The youth elite became the first to attend disciplined church schools in the colonies rather than academies in corrupt Albion.  Gradually, colonists began separating into mutually loathing camps, one defending and the other attacking the Crown.  Sound familiar again?

During each of these periods, Americans celebrated an ethos of frenetic and laissez-faire individualism (a word first popularized in the 1840s) yet also fretted over social fragmentation, epidemic violence, and economic and technological change that seemed to be accelerating beyond society's ability to absorb it.

During each of these periods, Americans had recently achieved a stunning victory over a long-standing foreign threat--Imperial Germany, Imperial New Spain (alias Mexico), or Imperial New France.  Yet that victory came to be associated with a worn-out definition of collective purpose--and, perversely, unleashed a torrent of pessimism.

During each of these periods, an aggressive moralism darkened the debate about the country's future.  Culture wars raged, the language of political discourse coarsened, nativist (and sectional) feelings hardened, immigration and substance abuse came under attack, and attitudes toward children grew more protective.

During each of these periods, Americans felt well-rooted in their personal values but newly hostile toward the corruption of civic life.  Unifying institutions, which had seemed secure for decades, now felt ephemeral.  Those who had once trusted the nation with their lives were growing old and dying.  To the new crop of young adults, the nation hardly mattered.  The whole res publica seemed on the verge of disintegrating.

During each of these previous Third Turnings, Americans felt as if they were drifting toward a cataclysm.

And, as it turned out, they were.

The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1850s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II.  All these Unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new form.

Each time, the change came with scant warning.  As late as December 1773, November 1859, and October 1929, the American people had no idea how close it was.  Then sudden sparks (the Boston Tea Party, John Brown's raid and execution, Black Tuesday) transformed the public mood, swiftly and permanently.  Over the next two decades or so, society convulsed.  Emergencies required massive sacrifices from a citizenry that responded by putting community ahead of self.  Leaders led, and people trusted them.  As a new social contract was created, people overcame challenges once thought insurmountable--and used the Crisis to elevate themselves and their nation to a higher plane of civilization: In the 1790s, they triumphantly created the modern world's first democratic republic.  In the late 1860s, wounded but reunited, they forged a genuine nation extending new guarantees of liberty and equality.  In the late 1940s, they constructed the most Promethean superpower ever seen.

The Fourth Turning is history's great discontinuity.  It ends one epoch and begins another.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Crown; Reprint edition (December 29, 1997)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0767900464
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0767900461
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.09 x 1.01 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,195 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9 in History & Theory of Politics
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Neil Howe
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Neil Howe is a historian, economist, and demographer who writes and speaks frequently on generational change in American history and on long-term fiscal policy. He is cofounder of LifeCourse Associates, a marketing, HR, and strategic planning consultancy serving corporate, government, and nonprofit clients. He has coauthored six books with William Strauss, including Generations (1991), 13th Gen (1993), The Fourth Turning (1997), and Millennials Rising (2000). His other coauthored books include On Borrowed Time (1988). And more recently Millennials Go to College (2007), and Millennials in the Workplace (2010). He is also a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where he helps lead the CSIS "Global Aging Initiative," and a senior advisor to the Concord Coalition. He holds graduate degrees in history and economics from Yale University. He lives in Great Falls, Virginia.
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William Strauss
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William Strauss (February 5, 1947 – December 18, 2007) was an American author, historian, playwright, theater director, and lecturer. As a historian, he is known for his work with Neil Howe on social generations and for the Strauss–Howe generational theory. He is also well known as the co-founder and director of the satirical musical theater group the Capitol Steps, and as the co-founder of the Cappies, a critics and awards program for high school theater students.
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les

Prognostication of a Crisis

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 3, 2020

Verified Purchase

“The Fourth Turning”, a Review
The main feature of “The Fourth Turning” is a prognostication of a major crisis set to occur
somewhere between the years 2005 and 2026. The book was copyrighted in 1997 and the
authors utilize their historiographic conceptualization of cycles in Anglo-American history to
formulate this prognostication. The comparison of cyclical time to linear time is quite thought
provoking; “The great weakness of linear time is that it ….cuts people off from the eternal” (pg.
11). The body of the book describes the cycles of history as recurring themes over each
saeculum. This term was probably introduced by the Etruscans and carried thru the Greek
civilization, taken to mean the expanse of a human lifespan and often considered as a century.
Four generations, each comprising approximately 20-25 years would span each approximate
80-100 year saeculum.
There is a certain complexity in following the precise nature of the rotation of the generations
within each saeculum and the relationship to historical events. This review includes an
addendum for those who want an overview of these relationships; most difficult to describe in
brief.
There are 7 saecula described beginning with the late Medieval period and culminating with the
current saeculum known as the Millennial saeculum. There are several elements that must be
understood to follow the correlation between historical events and the cycles of generations. It
would be of value for the reader mark the book’s pages that describe each element or copy
some of the pages into a notebook that tabulate the various components so they could be
easily referred to as one reads the text.
The authors, as others before them, describe history as cyclical as opposed to a linear
movement through time. The cycles of the saecula mirror each other; each containing a civic
High, an Awakening, an Unraveling of society, and finally a Crisis; sort of a Hegelian dynamic.
Though the particular events of each saeculum vary, the root expression of these “Turnings”
are the same.
The text traces the causative principals underlying these cycles, which are predicated on the
Weltanschauung of the generations within the saeculum. Though the recurrent nature of
historical events is of interest, the climax and probable intent of the book is to alert the reader
to the Crisis that awaits us- and appears to be happening currently.
ADDENDUM
This quick summary of the cycles of history is not for the faint hearted. The actual text is hard
to follow because of the many elements overlapping in correlation with historical events
extending from the 15th Century thru the 21st Century.
Every saeculum has a unique name defining its major theme: Reformation, New World, Civil
War, etc. Each generation has a moniker throughout the 7 saecula and therefore 28 names of
28 generations. There are 4 archetypes which define the characteristics the generations;
Prophet, Artist, Hero, and Nomad. One of the 4 archetypes is unique to each of the 4
generations within a saeculum and each saeculum contains each of the 4 archetypes. As a
newborn begins childhood, the prior three generations advance. The existing childhood
generation enters young adulthood, the prior young adults enter midlife, and the prior
midlifers, displace the elders. Associated with this maturation sequence is a change of the
status of the generations within the society. Accordingly, there is a concomitant change in the
position of the archetype within the saeculum. (If this is confusing, one may need to re-think
the relationship of the archetype to the generation). It is the juxtapositions of the archetypes
that define what the authors call the “Turnings” or the historical event-types common to every
saeculum, (though unique in specific details, of course, according to the to the specifics of the
Age). For example, when the Prophets are the elders and the Heroes are the young adults, the
Crisis of the “Fourth Turnings” occur; the Great Depression of the last saeculum, the Civil War in
the saeculum prior, and the American Revolution in the saeculum before that.
Perhaps an example will help. I will use the time of the birth of the Baby Boomer generation to
demonstrate. It will be hard to understand in this abbreviated format, but it gives the potential
reader an idea of the puzzle.
GENERATION BIRTH YEARS PHASE OF LIFE ARCHETYPE
Lost Generation 1883-1900 Elderhood Nomad
GI Generation 1901-1924 Midlife Hero
Silent Generation 1925-1942 Young Adulthood Artist
Baby Boomers 1943-1960 Childhood Prophet
Every generation has a unique name. As the Boomers entered childhood, the Silent Gen.
became young adults, the GI gen. entered midlife, and the Lost Gen. became the elders within
this saeculum (replacing Missionary Generation who were the elders and Prophets of the prior
saeculum). Just like a tennis ladder when the Gen. X (1961-1981) children are born (as Nomads
replacing the Lost Gen Nomads) the Boomers move to young adulthood (maintaining their
Prophet archetype), the GI generation becomes the elders (Heroes) and this process continues
thru time.
When the Prophets (Boomers) become the Elders (roughly 2005-2026) and the yet to be born
Millennials (born 1982-1985-ish) enter young adulthood (as Heroes) the Fourth Turning and the
Crisis will be upon us. Witness the contested election, the Recession, and Coronavirus-19.
The characteristics of the archetype are fully defined within the book. The juxtaposition of the
4 archetypes play a crucial role. The positioning of the archetypes depicted in the table above
is known as a First Turning and it is a period associated with a highpoint of the society. The
post war Boomers were born in a period of American growth and opportunity. The Second
Turning (known as the Awakening) occurs when Gen X enters the picture and the juxtaposition
of the archetypes changes. The Third and Fourth Turnings occur in turn introducing the Decline
and the Crisis.
If you think this is confusing, remember there are 7 Anglo-American saecula that repeat these
cycles and are associated with historic events that mirror the Turnings associated with those of
the Millennial saeculum depicted above. The preceding crisis (Fourth Turning) was the Great
Depression. Before that The Civil War, etc.
A slow appreciation of all of this data takes some work but the extraordinary prognostication of
the current Crisis seems to be upon us.

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Tim Knight

Superb and Prophetic

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 13, 2012

Verified Purchase

After many instances of prodding from readers, I finally bought and read The Fourth Turning, and I'm sorry that I waited so long. It was a superb read, and it puts into words (340 pages of words, in fact) the general feeling I've had for so long that something big and bad is happening all around us.

I want to emphasize at the outset that this isn't some doom 'n' gloom book that came off the presses after all the calamities we've seen over the past decade. It is, in fact, a fifteen-year old book, and I imagine much of it was written around 1995 or so, during the feel-good Clinton years. When the book came out in 1997, the authors made clear that they were currently in the Third Turning, and that the Fourth Turning - the final quarter of a cycle that they postulate recurs throughout modern human history - was coming around 2005 or so.

Strauss and Howe write:

Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era - a turning - every two decades or so....Together the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, naturation, entropy, and destruction:

+ The First Turning is a High; an upbeat era of strengthening instutitions and weakening individualism;

+ The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spirtual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime;

+ The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strrengtening individualism and weakening institutions;

+ The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

As they anticipated the next "Turning", they referenced its start point around 2005, in the middle of the "Oh-Oh" decade (which I've now heard referred to as the "Naughts"):
The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millenium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood...Political and economic trust will implode...severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire...the very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

I would suggest, and I'm sure many would agree, that the attacks of 9/11 were the "sudden spark". Early in the book, the authors describe how there have, through human history, been three general ideas about the path of time in our lives - chaotic, cyclical, linear. The entire basis of the book is that the cyclical perception of the world is the accurate one, and the human species continues to move its way through this quartet of cycles, totalling about the length of a human life, called a Saeculum. We are presently in The Millennial Saeculum, which is broken down into these four parts:

+ The American High (1946-1964);

+ The Consciousness Revolution (1964-1984);

+ The Culture Wars (1984-2005?);

+ The Millennial Crisis (which, when the book was published, was yet to arrive)

If you consider the four quarters of a Saeculum to the time "axis" of the grid, the other is made of the human archetypes, whose character depends on their generation as well as what portion of the Saeculum is currently running. The present archetypes are described as follows:

+ The Boom Generation (Prophet archetype, born 1943-1960);

+ The 13th Generation (Nomad archetype, born 1961-1981);

+ The Millennial Generation (Hero archetype, born 1982-?);

+ The Artist archetype is being born now

I'm a member of what they dub the 13th Generation, so-called simply because it is the 13th generation of Americans that they track.

Many of the predictions about the near-future that were offered are eerily accurate, whereas others are embarassingly wrong, such as the supposition that, to celebrate the year 2000, "Others will board a chartered Concorde just after midnight and zoom back through time from the third millennium to the second." Of course, I can't fault the authors for not anticipating the fiery end of the Concorde fleet!

I am, of course, most interested in the Crisis era, since that is supposedly what we're in the midst of living; the authors declare the Crisis can be constructed with this morphology:

+ A Crisis era begins with a catalyst - a startling event (or sequence of events) that produces a sudden shift in mood

+ Once catalyzed, a society achieves a regeneracy - a new counter-entropy that reunifies and reenergizes civic life.

+ The regenerated society propels toward a climax - a crucial moment that confirms the death of the old order and birth of the new.

+ The climax culminates in a resolution - a triumphant or tragic conclusion that separates the winners from losers, resolves the big public questions, and establishes the new order

Here again, I would think most would agree the 9/11 attacks would serve the definition of "catalyst" quite well. As the book draws to a close, it delves into greater detail about what could be forthcoming from the perspective of someone writing in 1997. I've emphasized a few items in bold:

Sometime around the year 2005, perhaps a few years before or after, America will enter the Fourth Turning.....a spark will ignite a new mood...In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party......the following circa-2005 scenarios might seem plausible:

+ A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons......Congress declares war.....Opponents charge that the president concocted the emergency for political purposes.

+ An impasse over the federal budget reaches a stalemate. The President and Congress both refuse to back down, triggering a near-total government shutdown.....Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. Default looms. Wall Street panics.

As superb as these projections were, the authors hasten to add - ironically - "It's highly unlikely that any one of these scenarios will actually happen." On the contrary, these guesses about the future (which, let's face it, required the authors to really go out on a limb) were excellent. They continue (although I am using ellipses to replace large chunks of text, since I'm not in the mood to re-type an entire book):

Time will pass, perhaps another decade, before the surging mood propels America to the Fourth Turning's grave moment of opportunity and danger: the climax of the Crisis.....the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

+ Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)

+ Social distress....

+ Cultural distress......

+ Technology distress, with cryptoanarchy, high-tech oligarchy, and biogenetic chaos

+ Ecological distress....

+ Political distress....

+ Military distress.......

This is a thoughtful, well-articulated, and engrossing book. As with any text that makes broad sociological assertions and generalizations, the authors have opened themselves up to plenty of criticism about the plausibility of their prophecy. Taken as a whole, I think this book provide an enlightening blueprint of both the present and the near-future. I strongly recommend it.

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Mr Philip L Horton

Tough read; out of date and... ...wrong!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 1, 2020

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I bought this after a news article referenced it - not realising that it was written more than 20 years ago! When reading, you constantly have to adjust to a 20 year old perspective. Then you get to the prophetic parts of the book (which have now largely arrived but not the way prophesied). Dissatisfying.

18 people found this helpful

mel pearson

5 star, how History Repeats (high's - crisis)

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 22, 2021

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Excellent book , well written and relevant to modern times, through the eyes of history and psychology. We are now at our next crisis in our line of history !
Would recommend reading.

5 people found this helpful

Peter Bjørn Hansen

Interesting, vague, but compelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 10, 2016

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While it is doubtful to say that this works is scientific, not least to its use of "prophesies" as a description of what one generation can expect from the next, it is nevertheless a compelling hypothesis that adolescents and adults absorb inputs and mold themselves around the world they come to inhabit, and that this likewise forms their outlook of the future and thus future society.

Should you dismiss this approach to historical understanding and prediction, you will at least be delighted in a fairly broad treatment of the last few centuries of Western history (though American-centric and obviously heavily pop-cultural in its treatment of recent times), that shaped societies into what led us to be here today.

14 people found this helpful

MR M HALL

Everyone should read this

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 29, 2021

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The current political and social climate we find ourselves in is not only predicted by this book but it’s fully explained. Books like this one should be thought in schools to help prevent the mistakes on the past.

5 people found this helpful

Eddy

WOW

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 20, 2020

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why history repeats, this book explains a lot.

8 people found this helpful

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