Book Review: Jennie Bristow, Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict

Abstract

Book Review: Jennie Bristow, Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict. London: Palgrave, 2015. ISBN: 978-1137454737 (Hardback). 212 Pages. $95.[Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2016 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]No generation arouses more ire or invective than Baby Boomers. Barack Obama (b. 1961), either a very late Boomer or very early Gen Xer, based his campaign in 2008 on transcending Boomer conflict; eight years earlier, George W. Bush ran on basis of calling his own Boomer generation to accountability, responsibility, and greatness. In 2016, Bernie Sanders, too old by a few years to be a Boomer himself, became champion of Millennials-some of them too young to even have Boomers as parents-by criticizing compromises made by Hillary Clinton and her husband in 1990s as emblems of Boomer cultural transformation and personal liberation (3) corroded by complacency and corruption.Indeed, in US Clintons have become so representative of Boomer generation that one's feelings about one are irretrievably colored by one's feelings about other. Thus it is salutary that Jennie Bristow's informative and thought-provoking study is written by a scholar based in UK and is largely premised on data from UK public sphere. This helps a global audience see what is at stake more clearly without distraction of ephemeral and parochial US concerns. Bristow makes clear from beginning that she is determined to read beyond publicsphere stereotypes of Boomers' significance. She decries a deliberate strategy to articulate (and indeed foment) a conflict between (5) on part of prominent political, media, and corporate actors, and wonders what is at bottom of all this. Is it that Boomers were felt to be so and entitled in Bristow's words degenerate hedonists (3) that they have now become scapegoated?Sagaciously, Bristow goes back into of very idea of generations, whose modern incarnation begins in Germany with sociologist Karl Mannheim. Mannhiem, according to Bristow, was interested in generations as a mode of understanding way in which knowledge is transferred across time and space. Mannheim rejected merely demographic ideas of generation proffered by positivism, which was only interested in mechanistic variables such as birth rate, for a broader, more heuristic and affective idea of parituclar moral values of a of people. He avoided, though, an excessive introversion of purely qualitative (33). Bristow then goes on to discuss Jose Ortega y Gasset and later US historian of generations Robert Wohl, noting that for both thinkers, a generational consciousness was linked with onset of modernity. In twentieth century, when society itself seemed in crisis and every generation seemed radically changed (34), human identity itself seemed variable, generationally inflected.The Baby Boomers, at least in US and UK, grew up in a world that had seemed to dodge crises of modernism, when as UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan boasted in 1959, You've never had it so good. When first recognized by society, they were identified as by their youth and good fortune. Bristow quotes British historian Dominic Sandbrook, who has written superbly of this era in British history, and who called Boomers the luckiest people in history (90). Yet Bristow goes on to say that this privileged cohort (91) in fact was an amalgam of people from many class, social, and ethnic backgrounds. There is thus an illusory cohesiveness to generations, for all force of shared experience and existential conditions. …