The problem of generationalism

Many of the problems with the way the ‘Covid generation’ has been conceptualized reflect the influence of generationalism – ‘the systematic appeal to the concept of generation in narrating the social and political’ (White, 2013, p 216) – on contemporary public debate. Generationalism, or ‘generationism’ (Ryder, 1965), has long been a source of frustration to sociologists and others working with the concept, as they try to distinguish its contribution to understanding social change from the reductive ways in which it is often applied, and the divisive ends to which it can be put.

White (2013) reviews the development of generationalism as ‘an emergent master-narrative on which actors of quite different persuasions converge as they seek to reshape prevalent conceptions of obligation, collective action and community’ (p 217). Today’s social problems, White argues, are frequently conceptualized as ‘the problems of generations’: in public debate over ‘baby boomers’ and the ‘jilted generation’, ‘problems of debt, access to higher education, housing, pensions, and the health of the environment are all routinely denominated in age-aware terms’ (White, 2013, p 216, emphasis in original). White’s analysis draws on Bourdieu’s (1991) sociology of categorization to show that the idea of generations in much political debate operates less as a ‘concept of existence’ (Nash, 1978) than as an instrument of social division. When, as White observes, generationalism becomes a ‘leading register of political discourse’ (White 2013, p 217), its divisive consequences are quick to manifest themselves in claims about inter-generational conflict.

Purhonen (2016) describes generationalism as ‘a special form of historicism, by which generations are interpreted as collective actors and the succession of generations as the primary engine of history’ (p 102). In overemphasizing the characteristics of different generations, this way of thinking results in ‘mere caricatures’, between which ‘artificial confrontations’ become instigated (Purhonen, 2016, p 102). This is the sentiment captured by the ubiquitous ‘generation labels’ that seem to operate as self-explanatory categories: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Z. Such labels are widely understood as the cultural expression of ‘social generations’: cohorts of people who share an outlook shaped by the historical moment in which they come of age, which both reflects and shapes the Zeitgeist and is often at odds with that of their elders.

‘Social generations’ were theorized by the Hungarian sociologist Karl Mannheim, whose 1928 essay ‘The problem of generations’ (Mannheim, 1952) has ‘often been described as the seminal theoretical treatment of generations as a sociological phenomenon’ (Pilcher, 1994, p 481), from which ‘[m]odern empirical studies proceed’ (Spitzer, 1973, p 1354). Written during the interwar period, when generational tensions were assuming an acute form in Europe, it attracted renewed scholarly interest and lively critique during later periods of political, cultural and demographic change, when the ‘generation question’ came to the fore: specifically, the periods following the Second World War and around the Millennium (Edmunds and Turner, 2005; Bristow, 2015). Yet as this insight has gained traction, it is often deployed in a reductive and deterministic fashion that misses the complex interactions at play in the emergence and expression of generational consciousness. Mannheim’s essay is explored in depth later in this chapter.

The idea of ‘social generations’ speaks to an understanding of the relationship between historical events and individual biography: something that Mills (1970 [1952]) regards as a key feature of the sociological imagination. People who come of age within a particular historical moment share a formative encounter with the events of that time, which is distinct from that of older and younger generations. It is distinct not because the events themselves are different, or because they strike young adults in a uniform way, but because of the stage individuals are at in their own lives. Focusing on the emergence of distinct social generations who appear to be at odds with each other, however, misses crucial elements of Mannheim’s understanding of cultural continuity and collaboration between generations, and divergences of outlook and experience within generations. In this regard, I contend that many of the difficulties identified with the concept of social generations stem from a reductive misreading of the original problem.

Current rhetoric about ‘generational conflict’ is underpinned by a deeper unease about the relationship between past, present and future: a temporal rupture, in which the past appears to offer at best an unhelpful guide to the future and at worst an obstructive barrier to the realization of historical progress. As discussed below, this is the problem at the heart of Mannheim’s original essay, developed within the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim’s theory has been subject to continuous development and critique. But while we should not treat his as the ‘last word’ on the sociological question of generations, a careful reading of the original ‘problem of generations’ reveals that it was, first and foremost, an attempt to counter the ‘generationalism’ of his times. Mannheim’s emphasis on specificity and relativity means that he would have been horrified by many of the claims made about ‘social generations’ today.

A brief summary of the sociology of generations

In the current ‘generation wars’, social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts are played out in the form of ideas about generations. Ideas about generations have excited the imagination for millennia (Kriegel, 1978), and the chapters in this book reveal the cross-disciplinary reach of this powerful yet contested concept. Sociological theories of generations were developed in conversation and critique with insights from other disciplines, including philosophy, history, anthropology, literature and the biological sciences. The concept encapsulates a complex understanding of the interaction between nature, culture, knowledge, time and community. As Abrams (1970) explains, sociological generations deal with ‘major redefinitions of whole cultures triggered by the reaction of particular age-groups within particular age spans to particular historical experiences; the convergence of individual time and social time; of age and history’ (pp 183–4).

Given its complexity, it is not surprising that the concept of social generations has long proved controversial. Ryder’s (1965) influential discussion of ‘the cohort as a concept in social change’ noted that ‘[m]any writers have used the succession of cohorts as the foundation for theories of sociocultural dynamics’, leaping from ‘inaccurate demographic observation to inaccurate social conclusion without supplying any intervening causality’ (p 853). Forms of ‘generationism’ include a fixation on ‘the biological fact of the succession of generations at thirty-year (father-son) intervals’, believed to demonstrate a periodicity to socio-cultural change (p 853). One version of this naturalized, cyclical approach, whose adherents ‘search for the regularities of the universal rhythm of generations’ (Jaeger, 1985, pp 280–1), is associated with the writings of Ortega y Gasset (1923). Generally considered an ‘outlandish’ approach (Dobson, 1989, p 176), it has gained more recent influence via contributions from writers such as Strauss and Howe (1991, 1997), whose claim that generations can provide ‘the history of America’s future’ imagines the concept in terms of a prophecy.

Another popular form of ‘generationism’ is the development of ‘a conflict theory of change, pitched on the opposition between the younger and the older “generations” in society, as in the family’. But, as Ryder argues: ‘The fact that social change produces intercohort differentiation and thus contributes to inter-generational conflict cannot justify a theory that social change is produced by that conflict’ (Ryder 1965, p 853). The attribution of a wide range of complex social problems to differences in outlook between parents, children and grandchildren, on matters ranging from cultural values to educational norms to appropriate childrearing practices, remains a persistent theme in contemporary discussions of parenting culture and policy (Lee et al, 2014). Official attempts to resolve differences through the promotion of up-to-date, ‘expert’ advice and regulation lead, in practice, to a further distancing of relations between the generations, as the values and practices of older generations become problematized as outdated and inappropriate (Bristow, 2016b; Furedi, 2021).

Kertzer’s (1983) influential overview of ‘generation as a sociological problem’ suggests that generations can be understood in broadly four different (but sometimes overlapping) ways: kinship descent, cohort, life stage and historical period. Kinship descent, he argued, has a ‘long tradition in social anthropology’, where it refers ‘not so much to parent-child relations as to the larger universe of kinship relations’. This sense of the term has also been used by demographers to develop measures for ‘length of generation’, where ‘the interest is in population replacement, based on the reproduction of females’; and in studies of value transmission, social mobility, and immigration. In the cohort sense, ‘“generation” refers to the succession of people moving through the age strata, the younger replacing the older as all age together’. Kertzer notes that the usage is ‘widespread beyond sociology’ and ‘finds frequent expression in intellectual history, where, for example, “literary generations” may succeed one another each 10 or 15 years’. He also explains that ‘the cohort notion of generation has extended beyond birth cohorts to apply to any succession through time’ – referring, for example, to ‘first, second or third “generations” of health behaviour studies’ (Kertzer 1983, p 126).

As Kertzer notes, ‘[t]hese meanings are all found in the sociological literature; indeed, many sociologists simultaneously use more than one’ (Kertzer, 1983, p 126). For example, he notes that Mannheim’s ‘confounding of the genealogical meaning of “generation” with the cohort sense of the term’ continues to be reflected in later research (p 127). In fact, as indicated in the discussion below, all of these uses of the concept of ‘generation’ are found in Mannheim’s theory, which is what gives his essay its expansive power – and accounts for many of the difficulties in applying his theory empirically (Pilcher, 1995).

Sociological theories of generation have developed in some important ways, as they attempt to theorize changing times. The uneasy socio-political context following the Second World War, and its eruption in the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s (Marwick, 1999), resulted in an energetic and constructive debate about generational conflict that brought together discussions between the disciplines of sociology, psychology and history in a discussion about the dilemmas involved in integrating young people in a context of rapid social, economic, institutional and technological change (Erikson, 1963; Keniston and Lerner, 1971). From the 1980s onwards, debates about social policy and welfare reform highlighted the demographic pressures placed on societies in the Global North by ageing populations and low birth rates (Preston, 1984; Quadagno, 1990; Walker, 1996), while sociological understandings of ‘the family’ came to emphasize the emergence of more diverse and fluid family forms and practices (Morgan, 2011), in the context of social and cultural constructions of childhood and ageing, and the opportunities and challenges offered by economic and cultural globalization (Giddens, 1991, 1992; Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Ruspini 2013).

A focus on generations has also led to critique, not least for the extent to which it can easily slide into a homogenizing ‘generationalism’. As France and Roberts (2015) argue in their critique of ‘the new emerging orthodoxy within youth studies’, the one-sided application of ‘the social generation paradigm’ (p 215) tends to flatten out differences in young people’s experience and distract scholarly and political attention from more significant sociological divisions. Globally, the application of Anglo-American constructs of ‘generation’ obscures differences between nations, cultures and societies in the meaning given to generations and the relations between them (Cole and Durham, 2007), and tends to gloss over generational tensions within other forms of identity and activism (Edmunds and Turner, 2002a; Henry, 2004).

The overuse and abuse of the concept of social generations has not only been challenged within youth studies. Researchers have also drawn attention to the problem of ‘Boomer blaming’: presenting the cohort born in the two decades following the Second World War as holding a universally ‘selfish’ set of values or attitudes that has ‘taken’ young people’s future from them (Willetts, 2010) and allegedly sharing an existence of untrammelled privilege that makes them insensitive to the plight of today’s young (Beckett, 2010; Howker and Malik, 2010; Gibney, 2017). Critics of Boomer-blaming draw attention to the ways in which such claims reflect wider demographic anxieties around population ageing and public spending, and present social, economic and political problems through a distorted generationalized lens (Phillipson et al, 2008; Bristow, 2015, 2016a, 2019, 2021a).

Arguably the biggest difficulty with making sense of social generations in the early 21st century is the contemporary sensibility around fragmented social time, and globalized social space. This is seen to be the product of a late modern ‘risk society’ (Giddens, 1991, 1992; Beck, 1992; Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Bauman, 2000, 2011), in which boundaries and transitions have become increasingly blurred, and discourses of ‘fluidity’ sit uneasily alongside attempts to categorize and generalize (Furedi, 2020a). By the end of the 20th century, a naturalized focus on the ‘life cycle’ in discussions of generational continuity had been challenged by a more flexible, qualitative focus on the life course: an approach that ‘introduced a dynamic dimension into the historical study of the family’, moving ‘analysis and interpretation from a simplistic examination of stages of the family cycle to an analysis of individuals’ and families’ timing of life transitions in relation to historical time’ (Hareven, 2000, p 14). The emergence of the life course approach reflects the increasing fluidity of kinship relations and personal ‘life stages’ from the latter part of the 20th century, providing a more nuanced and reflexive approach to understanding the experience of growing up and ageing ‘arising from the theme of transition and the centrality of cultural and historical contexts’ (Pilcher, 1995, p 21).

The focus on life courses, like much contemporary sociological theory of family life, youth, and ageing, tends to emphasize qualitative experience and meaning. In this sense, it provides a challenge to functionalist analyses of life transitions that made an influential contribution to the study of generations, and particularly youth, in the mid-20th century (Eisenstadt, 1956, 1963, 1971), which focused on the question of how to integrate young people into the norms and roles of adult society. Leccardi and Ruspini (2016) write of the differences between debates about youth during much of the 20th century and those marked by ‘more recent history’, which ‘is characterized by fragmentation, the outcome of the lack of a true centre from which conflicts may radiate’. They situate this in the context of ‘the great processes of change in the last few decades – from de-industrialization to the rise in education levels, from the transformation of gender and family models to the de-standardization and precariousness of labour and the explosion of the political crisis’. One consequence of this has been ‘a de-standardization and growing contingency in life-courses and identity’, and a restructuring of intergenerational relations (Leccardi and Ruspini, 2016, pp 1–2).

As Leccardi and Ruspini write, the disruption to life-course patterns ‘affects all generations, and creates new conditions of generalized uncertainty’ (2016, p 2). This sense of temporal fragmentation is not, therefore, a condition of youth itself, but of the broader social and cultural circumstances of our contemporary ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992). Leccardi elaborates: ‘The crisis in industrial time brings with it a crisis in the “normal” biography that constructs itself around this time: youth as preparation for work, adulthood as work performance, old age as retirement’ (Leccardi, 2016, p 15).

In theorizing these changes, sociologists have developed non-linear biographical models such as ‘the so-called choice biography’, or ‘risk biography’, which are ‘characterized by strong individualization’ and ‘connected to the need to make decisions in a social context characterized by great uncertainty’ (Leccardi, 2016, p 17, emphasis in original).

The observation that disruption to life-course patterns affects all generations is shared by sociological literature on the social and cultural construction of ageing (Phillipson, 2013), and in work on the meaning of adulthood. For example, the historian Stephen Mintz (2015) acknowledges that the transition to adulthood has recently grown ‘more protracted and problematic as acquisition of the traditional markers of adult identity – marriage, childbirth, and entry into a full-time career – are delayed into the late twenties’ (p 68). However, as Mintz argues, a more significant change is the kind of adulthood that young people emerge into: not a stable identity, but a time of ongoing ‘flux and mutability’. ‘Instability, uncertainty, and a desire to grow, but not grow up and settle down, persist into adults’ thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties,’ he explains. ‘A script that shaped expectations of adulthood through much of the twentieth century has unravelled’ (pp 68–9). The emergence of new ‘life stage’ concepts, such as ‘emerging adulthood’ to denote ‘the winding road from the late teens through the twenties’ (Arnett, 2000, 2014), and the ‘Third Age’ to describe an active period between retirement from work and the dependency of ‘old age’ (Laslett, 1987), reflect these developments.

The relationship between past, present and future is central, both to the understanding of relations between generations, and the emergence of a shared consciousness within them. This was the problem that Mannheim grappled with back in the 1920s, during times that were quite different to our own, but raised no fewer challenges when it came to the problem of ‘thinking generations’ (White, 2013).

Revisiting Mannheim, a century on

The developments in the sociology of generations summarized above often take the form of a challenge, or corrective, to Mannheim’s original theory of ‘the problem of generations’. I suggest, however, that they can more fruitfully be regarded as an updating: in line with the specific historical moment in which we find ourselves, and in line with Mannheim’s own appreciation of the dynamism of knowledge and its continual reconstruction. In Mannheim’s theorization, a number of complex tensions are worked through, between: biology and culture in the transmission of ideas; individual and collective experience; the meanings developed by generations and the meanings attributed to them by wider society; continuity and change in the transmission of the cultural heritage. These are the very tensions that form the basis for subsequent critiques of, and confusions about, the ‘social generations’ concept, and the development of Mannheim’s ideas a century on.

The ‘problem of generations’, for Mannheim, was not about the granular experiences of different age cohorts; or about the specific relationships between parents and children, and older people and younger people; or about particular ‘youth’ attitudes towards the topics of the day. Generations were about knowledge and meaning: how a society understands itself and its history, and how knowledge is constructed and reconstructed over time. He thus presented his theory of generations as the final in a collection of essays on the sociology of knowledge. As in his work on Ideology and Utopia (1936), Mannheim sought both to analyse ‘the relationship between knowledge and existence’ and ‘to trace the forms that this relationship has taken in the development of mankind’ (Mannheim, 1936, p 264) – a journey that led him to explore the ways in which different social groups, in different historical periods, came to understand their world (Wagner, 1952).

Mannheim’s essay on generations combined critiques of, and insights from, both the ‘positivist’ and the ‘historical-romantic’ schools of sociological and philosophical thought. The former, he argued, regarded the succession of generations ‘as something which articulated rather than broke the unilinear continuity of time’, and saw the importance of generations in terms of ‘one of the essential driving forces of progress’; while the latter regarded it ‘as the problem of the existence of an interior time that cannot be measured but only experienced in purely qualitative terms’ (Mannheim 1952, p 281). The question, for Mannheim, was how to understand the interaction between the qualitative experience of being born in a particular time and place, and the social and cultural meaning of generational change.

By theorizing the significance of generations within the transmission and development of knowledge, Mannheim’s contribution provided a framework for understanding the emergence of generational consciousness in relation to wider social and cultural events. The problem of generations was intimately related to the wider question of how knowledge is concretely situated, transmitted and developed. What we know about the world cannot be decoupled from how we come to know it: society’s ‘accumulated cultural heritage’ is not something static that is merely passed down, but is continually transmitted to, and refreshed by, ‘new participants in the cultural process’, who make ‘fresh contacts’ with our society. People born at a particular point in history embody, and internalize, the experience of their time; but they do not do this in the same way as those who have come before them. Thus, consciousness is developed within, and informed by, the experience of coming of age in a particular time and place.

For Mannheim, the significance of generations lay in the interaction between ‘new participants in the cultural process’, and the society in which these participants are born and develop, and which they, in turn, transform. A group of people who have grown up with a particular idea about the way things are and why, will see things differently to those who come across this knowledge afresh. This is not because they happen to be older or younger, or different kinds of people – it is because of their location in an historical moment, and the wider social events of their time. Understanding generations requires appreciating both the features of their biological existence – the fact that we are always absorbing new members into our society – and their social experience, which is temporally distinct from that of their elders.

The continual emergence of new participants in society, who would make ‘fresh contacts’ with the existing wisdom and interpret it in their own ways, gives knowledge its dynamism and creativity. In passing on the cultural heritage, society was able to remember what it knew to be important – but equally important was the way that knowledge developed in this process enabled us to forget. Historical memory worked through generations of people to combine the power of accumulated wisdom with the ‘up-to-dateness’ of youth, enabling an ‘elasticity of mind’ that is able to provide continuity and engage with change, and compensate for ‘the restricted and partial nature of the individual consciousness’. While generational change does result in a ‘loss of accumulated cultural possessions’, it also ‘facilitates re-evaluation of our inventory and teaches us both to forget that which is no longer useful and to covet that which has yet to be won’ (Mannheim, 1952, p 294). He contends that ‘[a]ll psychic and cultural data only really exist in so far as they are produced and reproduced in the present’ (Mannheim 1952, p 295).

Mannheim’s concern is with the transmission of the ‘accumulated cultural heritage’ both through ‘conscious teaching’ and, more importantly, informal mechanisms of generational interaction. He differentiates between ‘two types of “fresh contact”: one based on a shift in social relations, and the other on vital factors (the change from one generation to another)’. He argues: ‘The latter type is potentially much more radical, since with the advent of the new participant in the process of culture, the change of attitude takes place in a different individual whose attitude towards the heritage handed down by his predecessors is a novel one’ (Mannheim 1952, p 294, emphasis in original).

This experience has consequences for the individual, around the age (Mannheim suggested) of 17, when ‘a quite visible and striking transformation of the consciousness of the individual in question takes place: a change, not merely in the content of experience, but in the individual’s mental and spiritual adjustment to it’ (Mannheim 1952, p 293). In this respect, it is worth noting Mannheim’s insistence on the importance of approaching a sociological understanding of the human psyche, which is a development of his approach to understanding the relationship between knowledge and existence. Just as a narrowly positivistic approach to the cultural sciences fails to grasp the scope of cultural meaning, he considered that a narrowly empirical approach to human psychology – the ‘functionalization and mechanization of psychic phenomena’ – loses ‘the unity of the mind as well as that of the person’ (Mannheim, 1936, p 23).

As Ryder argued in 1965, one popular form of ‘generationism’ assumes that social conflicts arise from the friction between ‘the younger and the older “generations” in society, as in the family’ (p 853). Yet Mannheim regarded the friction between older and younger generations largely as a feature of intergenerational collaboration rather than conflict. The relationship between the generations is continuous, spontaneous and often informal, and the fact that ‘[g]enerations are in a state of constant interaction’ means that they develop a sensitivity to one another – ‘not only does the teacher educate his pupil, but the pupil educates his teacher too’ (p 301). Within the intimate relationships of the family, much of what young people know about the world is absorbed unconsciously: it is the way things are. As the young person matures and ‘personal experimentation with life begins’, they gain the possibility of ‘really questioning and reflecting on things’ (p 300).

A young person’s coming of age, then, is the point at which tensions between the generations potentially come to the fore. Whether they erupt into something more significant, creating something that later theorists and commentators would describe as a ‘generation gap’, depends on wider social forces operating at that time, and the interaction between the pace of social change and the cohorts coming to maturity.

In explaining why the problem of generations should be considered as ‘one of the indispensable guides to an understanding of the structure of social and intellectual movements’, Mannheim argued that ‘its practical importance’ lay in trying to gain ‘a more exact understanding of the accelerated pace of social change’ characteristic of the interwar period in which he was writing (Mannheim, 1952, p 287). In other words, analysis of the significance of generations, particularly when attending to questions of conflict, should be firmly grounded in its historical context. A distinctive generational consciousness does not arise simply from the passage of time, as is implied by current generationalist narratives of the difference in the ways that ‘Millennials’ and ‘Generation Z’ relate to social media, for example. Rather, it is the outcome of social and cultural conflict, when the knowledge and experience of the past comes starkly into tension with the present day.

‘Generation as an actuality,’ Mannheim argued, involves ‘more than mere co-presence’ at a particular time and place – it requires ‘participation in the common destiny of this historical and social unit’ (Mannheim, 1952, p 303). The conditions under which such ‘actual’ generations are formed arise ‘only where a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization’. The destabilization provoked by accelerated social change can result in a shared consciousness among those coming into adulthood, as young people lack the historical experience of older generations, meaning that they are ‘dramatically aware of a process of de-stabilization and take sides in it’. It can also result in a schism between the generations, as ‘the older generation cling to the re-orientation that had been the drama of their youth’ (pp 300–1, emphasis in original). Conflict between generations, therefore, is both the product of a wider social and cultural conflict, and contributes to it.

Mannheim’s identification of the conditions that give rise to the emergence of an ‘actual generation’ – the collision of wider forces in a period of accelerated change – form the basis of his understanding of ‘social generations’. It is important, however, to distinguish between his account of ‘actual generations’, whose temporal and geographical circumstances provide the possibility for a shared generational consciousness, and the form of consciousness that is produced by members of that actual generation. As Woodman and Wyn (2015, p 8) explain, Mannheim’s theory ‘does not present a generation as a homogenous group of young people’ – as is often claimed by critics within the field of youth studies. Rather, Mannheim argues that ‘a generation is made up of sometimes radically different and potentially politically opposed “generational units”’ – groups that ‘react in different ways to the conditions of their times due to their different social positions’ (Woodman and Wyn, 2015, p 8).

Noting that ‘[t]he generation unit represents a much more concrete bond than the actual generation as such’, Mannheim stresses the following point: ‘Youth experiencing the same concrete historical problems may be said to be part of the same actual generation; while those groups within the same actual generation which work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways, constitute separate generation units’ (Mannheim, 1952, p 304, emphasis in original).

His discussion of ‘generation units’ is an attempt to account for the particular form that generational consciousness might take. The experience of peers living through a tumultuous period will be heterogeneous; the meaning of that experience, the ways in which members of a generation ‘work up the material of their common experiences’, will depend on where they are located in social class and other divisions. Thus, for example, the young men who made up the ‘Generation of 1914’ shared the experience of the trenches, but they experienced different risks, problems and privileges. Disenchantment may have been the overriding theme of the times, as discussed further in the next chapter, but the bitter sense of betrayal articulated by the First World War poets was not shared by all of their peers. The fellow-feeling shared by this ‘actual generation’ was undercut by powerful ideologies, political allegiances and social differences that drew people of the same age in quite different directions.

Woodman and Wynn (2015) explain that generation units, a ‘central element of Mannheim’s framework’, has tended to be overlooked by youth researchers, largely due to ‘a conflation of continuity and inequality’, in which ‘the notion of generations was linked to an implicit and homogenising type of generationalism’ (p 8). As discussed earlier in this chapter, we also see the distorting influence of generationalism in research and commentary that purports to endorse Mannheim’s understanding of social generations but without either attending to the historical conditions that give rise to ‘generations of actuality’ or allowing for the emergence of differential ‘generation units’. This leads to crude claims about ‘what Boomers believe’ or ‘what Millennials want’.

Woodman and Wyn suggest that ‘one limitation’ of Mannheim’s theory is that ‘[h]is theorising tends to rest on the potential for a shared consciousness to emerge among some sections of a generation as a catalyst for political movements, neglecting other more mundane and affective forms of generational subjectivity’ (2015, p 8). This problem of politicization derives, first of all, from a tendency to separate Mannheim’s writing from its historical context – the very thing that his emphasis on ‘social location’ warned against. Individuals are located in a social class and a generation: one does not replace the other in importance, and each gives rise to a different dynamic regarding political outlook and action. The interwar period was a time of polarized class conflict, in which cultural conflicts were liable to translate into political sensibilities. Yet over the course of the 20th century, political movements became detached from their anchor in social class (Giddens, 1994; Wood, 1998) and tended to assume a more self-consciously cultural form. Class politics, which were rooted in economic interests, were gradually giving way to battles over cultural values, with youth styled as the agents of ‘progressive’, future-oriented change in contrast to the older generations, stereotyped as clinging onto the past (Bristow, 2015, 2019).

During the later part of the 20th century, ideas about ‘social generations’ gained popularity as an account of the expression of political agency that appears to be rooted in age, or generation, rather than social class. Around the turn of the century, Edmunds and Turner (2002b) drew on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to develop the idea of a ‘strategic generation’, which is ‘generative of the conditions of thinking and action of subsequent cohorts. In Marxist terminology, it is a generation for-itself (as distinct from the passive “generation in-itself”)’ (Edmunds and Turner, 2002b, pp 17–18). Their suggestion is that when class no longer provides an obvious expression of agency – ‘class for itself’ – then the consciousness of generations can provide an alternative, in the form of a strategic ‘generation for-itself’ mobilizing its interests in the context of scarcity. In policy rhetoric, the idea of particular generations operating as ‘strategic generations’, using their demographic and cultural weight to influence policy in a direction that is favourable to their self-interest, and the claim that the main divide in politics is age or generation, has formed an important aspect of ‘Boomer blaming’ claimsmaking, which blames the Baby Boomer generation for creating conditions of ‘generational inequity’ in access to social and economic resources (Bristow, 2019).

Here, we again see the danger of generationalism, in the form of a homogenizing discourse that underplays important differences and intersections, including those of class, gender, ethnicity, and geographical location, and economic and social conflicts are (mis)represented as conflicts between generations. It is worth noting that other scholars have developed Bourdieu’s concept of habitus alongside the idea of social generations in quite a different direction, to include ‘other more mundane and affective forms of generational subjectivity’ (Woodman and Wyn, 2015, p 10), or to draw on wider elements of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction to challenge ‘historicized’ accounts that interpret of generations as ‘collective actors’ and ‘the primary engine of history’ (Purhonen, 2016).

We should therefore be wary of claims that view generations in terms of political movements and ideas. We should also treat with caution long-running attempts to associate whole cohorts with a particular outlook on cultural issues and values, which reflects the intersection of age and generation with other dynamics (Marwick, 1999; Bristow, 2015; Duffy, 2021). Duffy’s (2021) study illustrates this with the example of the polarization shown by ‘long-term generational trends on attitudes to abortion in the US’, where, from the 1970s onwards, ‘around half … of Americans have consistently said that a married woman should not be able to get a legal abortion just because she does not want more children’, and over 40 per cent of ‘Generation Z’ still hold this view. Thus, ‘[t]he issue splits the country down the middle, regardless of generation’. National context is also significant: attitudes to abortion are ‘entirely different’ in Britain, where, with the exception of the very old, ‘Pre-War generation’, in 2016 only a quarter of the population say ‘that a woman should not be allowed to have an abortion if she simply did not wish to have the child’ (Duffy, 2021, p 181)

Attempts to ‘globalize’ a cohort’s experience also raise some challenging questions. Writing in 1928, Mannheim emphasized the importance of geographical location in the development of any kind of generational consciousness. ‘Young people in Prussia about 1800 did not share a common generation location with young people in China at the same period,’ he argued. ‘Membership in the same historical community … is the widest criterion of community of generation location’, which takes specific forms in specific places (Mannheim, 1952, p 303). However, developments in culture and technology during the later 20th century prompted sociologists to discussed the potential for the emergence of a globalized generational consciousness. In this vein, Edmunds and Turner (2005) suggest that ‘because the growth of global communications technology has enabled traumatic events, in an unparalleled way, to be experienced globally’, the sociology of generations ‘should develop the concept of global generations’ (p 559).

There is an important insight here, particularly given the cultural diffusion of generationalist claims and identities from the late 20th century onwards; and the trend has doubtless been consolidated by the internet and social media (as shown by, for example, the rapid transatlantic diffusion of the ‘Boomer Remover’ meme, and its predecessor, ‘OK Boomer’) (Elliot, 2022). But discussions of ‘global generations’ tend to reproduce the problem of homogenizing discourses, both in terms of the domination of the Global North perspective over other ways in which societies work up the meaning of their experiences and an implicit conflation of particular cultural expressions – such as the music of the 1960s or the social media memes of the 2020s – with the more grounded and nuanced ways in which people derive meaning from their lives.

Understanding the role that generations play in the transmission and reconstruction of knowledge therefore requires a nuanced analysis of the many other factors at play in this process. Mannheim’s problem of generations relates not only to understanding of how generational consciousness is generated but understanding why the consciousness of one particular ‘generation unit’ comes to dominate. When we think about particular generations, such as the Generation of 1914, or the Baby Boomers, we are not thinking about the entire, diverse experience of a whole cohort but about the ‘generation unit’ that came to express the Zeitgeist of that changing time. From the First World War poets to the musicians of the 1960s counterculture, these expressions tend to reflect the antagonistic break from the ‘old’ captured by a section of that youthful elite. The ‘voice of a generation’ thus speaks to the temporal and cultural disruption undergone by a whole society, and the way that society goes on to process this experience. What defines that generation is not the common experience of all of its members but the way that a particular ‘generation unit’ has most clearly expressed and shaped the spirit of its age.

In this regard, understanding the meaning of generations also means understanding the influence of generationalism over cultural and political debates. Separating the concept of generation from the tendency towards generationalism can therefore be difficult, particularly in a context such as today, where generationalist thinking has become a ‘leading register of political discourse’ (White, 2013).

Conclusion: conceptualizing the ‘Covid generation’ in context

The influence of generationalist thinking, and the divisive ends to which it is often put, is why we should be wary of claims about the experiences of, and outcomes for, what is now routinely labelled the ‘Covid generation’. This label, and its variations, has become ubiquitous in academic, media and policy discussions about the impact of the pandemic upon young people; but the question of what, and to whom, that label refers is difficult to discern. Does it mean all babies, children and young people alive during the pandemic, and if so where should be the cut-off point? Or does it refer more narrowly to the coming-of-age cohort previously badged ‘Generation Z’, for whom there has long been a search for a catchier tag? The pandemic was a global phenomenon, to which different societies responded in different ways: so how generalizable is the term beyond (for example) the UK? Even if we can agree on a definition of the ‘Covid generation’, how do we account for the diversity of experiences and outcomes within that cohort – or draw clear distinctions with other cohorts, who also lived through the pandemic and feel shaped by it?

Predictions of dire outcomes for a global ‘Covid generation’, or the presentation of the pandemic response as something that was done to protect the old at the expense of the young, amount to simplistic determinism (Bristow and Gilland, 2020; Bristow, 2021b). Given the problems associated with ‘the (mis)application of generations for making sense of uncertain times’ (Rudolph and Zacher, 2020, p 139), it is tempting to focus sociological work on critiques of the concept of ‘social generations’, if not abandon it altogether. Yet claims that seek to strip the experience of the pandemic of its distinctive generational meaning, whether by falsely universalizing it (‘we’re all in it together’), or by dramatically individualizing it (‘everyone had a different experience’), fail to acknowledge the significance of this historical moment for those coming into adulthood at this moment in time. It is here that ‘social generations’ come into their own.

For all the difficulties with the concept, a nuanced understanding of ‘social generations’ may have an important role to play in understanding our current historical moment, and its implications for the future. This is less to do with the experience of the pandemic itself than with the meaning that our societies have attributed to it, as an ‘unprecedented’ event requiring a decisive break from the social, economic, and cultural conventions that hitherto framed our social existence. It seems that the upheavals provoked by the pandemic were no mere historical ‘blip’, after which everything could return to ‘normal’: they represented part of a much wider process of accelerated social change, in which ‘wider social forces’ (Mannheim, 1952) would come forcefully into conflict, creating a schism between past and present.

The pandemic, and the globalized response of ‘lockdowns’, did not by itself cause this rupture. In many ways, these were the outcome of economic, social, political and international tensions that have been building for decades (Furedi, 2014; Mullan, 2020; Bauman, 2011). Yet at the same time, the extreme character of the social response, with its implications for national economies, education systems, health services, and established ways of life, consolidated and accelerated trends towards polarization and inequality. As the historian Toby Green, author of The Covid Consensus: The new politics of global inequality, argues, while much liberal-left discourse focused on the extent to which the pandemic has exposed existing inequalities, this has often failed to ‘acknowledge the role of lockdowns in intensifying this process’. ‘In truth’, argues Green, ‘the pandemic has exposed these inequalities in much the same way that an earthquake exposes an existing crack in the earth and turns it into a chasm’ (Green, 2021, p 28). We can perceive a similar trend with the cultural battles that are coming to define our present moment: fragmentation and polarization were apparent before Covid, but it now seems that a ‘chasm’ has now opened up between different perceptions of the world within communities.

Following Mannheim, we can surmise that this historical moment may well give rise to an ‘actual generation’, comprising a cohort who experienced ‘the same concrete historical problems’. The events of 2020 and beyond represent a new epoch far more significant than the expressions of social change that have often previously been highlighted as the makings of a generation: the turn of the Millennium, for example, or the ubiquity of social media. The all-encompassing character of lockdowns and associated Covid-19 restrictions gave the crisis an intimate, personal quality that could not be ignored. The disruption of social time, and the upheaval of taken-for-granted ways of living and interacting, gave social distancing measures an intimate quality that impacted every dimension of life for a substantial period. This had distinctive implications for those coming of age, at the point where they were ‘really questioning and reflecting on things’ (Mannheim, 1952, p 300), who found that those rites of passage that had previously been considered all-important stages on the path to their personal futures simply disappeared, in a cloud of anxiety about the problem of the present. In particular, the closure of schools and universities as core institutions of education and socialization, followed by attempts to substitute ‘online learning’ of curriculum content, raised some profound questions about the value that contemporary ‘risk society’ places on the transmission of ‘the accumulated cultural heritage’ to the young.

Yet precisely because of the all-encompassing character of this moment, we should also heed Mannheim’s insistence on the other factors that would lead members of this generation to ‘work up the material of their common experiences in different specific ways’, becoming separate generation units (Mannheim, 1952, p 304; emphasis in original). While this ‘traumatic event’ (Edmunds and Turner, 2005) may create the conditions for a distinctive generational consciousness, the meaning of this experience has a fragmented and atomized quality.

An uneasy tension has thus emerged between a globalized narrative that framed ‘the Covid consensus’ as a common threat requiring a standardized response, and the national, local, and personal circumstances that mitigated against the deeper adoption of any kind of consensus. For example, understanding that the pandemic was a global experience which provoked a particular global response could easily distract from a sensitivity to the contradictory dynamics at play. One paradox was that people’s actual experience became parochial: travel restrictions within and between nations, and the difference in legal detail between nations and even regions regarding, for example, the duration of school closures, or the imposition of curfews and other social distancing measures, means that it is difficult to argue robustly that any particular cohort, even within the same country, lived through the same kind of ‘lockdown’.

Arguably the most significant feature of our moment lies in the symbolic rupture between the generations, as embodied representatives of past, present, and future, captured by the narrative of ‘unprecedented’ events, and the logic of ‘social distancing’. As Furedi (2020b) notes in his discussion of ‘social distancing, safe spaces and the demand for quarantine’, social theorists have long held an interest in the phenomenon of social distance. Mannheim, back in the 1930s, suggested that social distance could signify both ‘an external or spatial distance’ or an ‘internal or mental distance’, and attended to the role played by fear in ‘the evolution of mental distancing from spatial distance’. ‘If I keep a safe space between myself and the stranger who is stronger than me, then, in this spatial distance between us there is contained the mental distance of fear,’ he observed. Mannheim regarded distancing as ‘one of the behaviour patterns which is essential to the persistence and continuity of an authoritarian civilisation’, while democracy ‘diminishes distances’ (Mannheim 1957, pp 47–8). Furedi explains that in Western culture today, distancing has become more positively embraced, with the notion of ‘safe spaces’ speaking to an aspiration for ‘ontological security’ (Giddens, 1991): ‘the sense of order and continuity – in the face of uncertainty’ (Furedi, 2020b, p 393).

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the Global North back in 2020, most acknowledged the necessity for some form of physical distancing between the generations: not least because of the age-based threat that the virus posed. Less anticipated was the extent to which this practical necessity would intersect with the longer-running construction of a mental distance between the generations, where the behaviours, conventions and knowledge associated with ‘the past’ were already held in question. As such, the promotion of this moment as an ‘unprecedented’ threat requiring an ‘unprecedented’ response dealt a symbolic blow to the transaction between the generations; how can older generations pass on what they know about life, when everything they know is deemed irrelevant to the current state of crisis? This is the question at the heart of discussions about the ‘Covid generation’, and one that will not be easily or rapidly resolved.