How Long Is a Generation?

Abstract

ALL OF THE RECENT TALK in the United States about the ; 'beat generation' and its meaning for our 'age' may well prove w Xto have been worthwhile after all if it provokes, among British and American sociologists, serious interest in the study of the problem of generations, a problem which, from Comte down to Mannheim and Ortega y Gasset, has consistently interested serious conanental thinkers. 2 For Mannheim and most other European students of the sllbject, the sociological importance of generations lies in the assumption that they are the agents or 'carriers' of major cultllral changes; changes in the 'spirit of the age' or the formulation of a new teitgeist are in large part the work (in Ortega's fateful view, the 'mission') of rising generations.3 While Britsh and American sociologists have in general neglected the problem of generations so conceived, survey researchers frequently use age-groups as one of the basic variables in terms of which they interpret their data. This essay is an attempt to analyse the peculiar place the generation concept has come to occupy in the vocabulary of American cllltllral discourse, and by so doing, to render the concept more useful for the pllrposes of empirical sociological analysis. Webster, following Herodotus, defines a generaiion as the period of time it takes for father to be succeeded by son, 'usually taken to be about thirty-three years', and Mannheim says that most students of the problem of generations agree that a generation 'lasts' about thirty years.4 Presllmably, then, if one begins at some arbitrary point, one would expect there to be roughly three 'ages' in a century-but only if a change in the spirit of the age follows the rising of each new generation.5 Clearly, however, this has not consistently been the case. In England it is commonly held that the last 'age' of the nineteenth century (the one we call 'Victorian') 'lasted' for some sixty years. But regarding the sixty years of our own century in the United States, it is now usual to suggest that there have been at least four distinct cultural 'periods' or 'ages'. Before World War I there was the 'age' of tycoons and moguls. The war was followed by the period known simply but eloquently as 'the twenties', or, in its roaring version, as the 'jazz age'. October I929 ushered in the 'proletarian decade' and the collective cultural expersence with Marxism that American intellectuals have still