Thinking Generations
European Institute Lunchtime Seminar, 18th October 2011
Jonathan White, LSE (j.p.white@lse.ac.uk)
--- First draft, not for citation --Often, and increasingly, social and political life is analysed with the concept of generation. This paper looks at
contemporary expressions of such ‘generationalism’ in British public discourse. It identifies the salient themes
which emerge, links these to the social and political contexts in which the narratives are produced, and
examines the points where they are vulnerable to critique. Bridging science and normativity, the generational
view offers a convenient master-narrative for a variety of political orientations – yet one whose democratic
credentials are questionable.
Keywords: generations; generationalism; British politics; identity
‘What did the Baby Boomers ever do for us?’, asks the title of a recent book by the British journalist
Francis Beckett. Very little of worth, is the suggestion. ‘The children of the sixties lived the dream
and failed the future’; the book is an effort to explain why (Beckett 2010). That the ‘baby boomers’
have been up to no good is also the contention of David Willetts MP: his book was called The Pinch:
How the Baby Boomers Stole Their Children's Future – and How they can Give it Back (Willetts
2010). Also released in 2010 was Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth, by two
twenty-something British journalists (Howker and Malik 2010). ‘Things go wrong in society all the
time,’ states the blurb, ‘but rarely do they go wrong for an entire generation.’ The book is packaged
as a ‘radical, angry and passionate’ analysis of the origins of this misadventure.
For these authors and more, today’s social problems are the problems of generations. That
individuals born at a certain time or marked by a certain era form an identifiable collective, onto
which patterns of action, belief or suffering can be mapped, is their common premise. That such
groups form the best starting-point for narrating the past and debating the present and future is their
shared contention. Problems of debt, access to higher education, the affordability of housing, the
future of pensions, and the health of the environment, are all habitually denominated in generational
terms. In today’s Britain, but also more widely, ‘generationalism’ (Wohl 1979) is in vogue. This
fact deserves scrutiny, for the reality of ‘generations’ is anything but self-evident. At a societal
level, beyond the family setting, the generational idea seems subjective and a touch poetic. Its
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boundaries can appear arbitrary: ‘there’s a generation born every second’, one is tempted to protest
(Spitzer 1973). Why would anyone depict the world in such elusive terms?
This paper investigates contemporary applications of the generational idea. It begins by
setting the emergence of generational narratives in historical context, drawing on analyses of past
moments of generational awareness.
It examines the key themes to be found in today’s
generationalism, setting these in relief against earlier varieties.
The paper goes on to seek
explanations for the popularity of generational thinking, some rooted in macro-social developments,
some in the political orientations of those who articulate it. Advanced too insistently to be a casual
turn of phrase, the generational view is a choice, one encouraged by structural factors and the
political opportunities it avails. The generational scheme, argues the paper, shows signs of being an
emergent master-narrative of politics, on which actors of quite different persuasion can agree. The
final section examines how adequately the generational view can live up to its promise. It looks at
the self-image of society such an idea evokes, and suggests some of the ways generationalism is in
tension with standard notions of democracy.
Generationalism in Historical Perspective
A concept of generation can be found in ancient thought and early Christianity (Nash 1978) (Burnett
2010). Yet like much of today’s political vocabulary its contemporary prominence is best traced to
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Its appeal can be linked to the ruptures of the
Enlightenment, the democratic revolutions, and subsequent processes of industrialisation. Following
historians of the generational idea (Kriegel 1978, Wohl 1979), several factors need emphasis. First,
these dislocations prompted the search for new metrics of social change, ones able to mark the
passage of time with greater precision than longer units such as the century or epoch, and greater
inclusivity than the royal dynasty or papal tenure. Unlike the cyclical change of traditional time,
these developments were experienced as transformative and progressive, and needed narration in a
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language which captured the novelty of each stage. That they were widely seen as led by the young
– ‘the standardbearers of the future in the present’ (Wohl 1979, p.204) – and celebrated in the name
of youth introduced an age dimension conducive to the generational scheme.
Second, these social changes bred the weakening of the local attachments of pre-modernity–
principally those to lord and parish. Just as such developments paved the way for the new language
of class, so they facilitated the equally de-parochialising notion of generation (Wohl 1979, p.207).
Moreover, third, these macro-historical developments were accompanied by specific changes in the
structure of society (Kriegel 1978): mortality rates declined, enabling the individual to imagine her
fate as a predictable trajectory, one shared by a peer-group; spouses became increasingly proximate
in age, giving clearer contours to family generations; occupations increasingly brought together
coevals; and rapid technological change created ever sharper skill differences between young and
old, underlining their separation in time. The rise of evolutionary theory consolidated the appeal of
generationalism’s biological overtones (Burnett 2010, p.27ff.). None of these changes, of course,
made it a necessary idea: they were enabling factors made decisive by the input of thinkers and
agitators.
A biological conception of generations was common in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
Many sought to derive pulse-like rhythms of social change from the time it took
newborns to reach adulthood, speculating on the true length of these intervals and linking them to
historical developments (Jaeger 1985). Yet one of the first major figures to attempt a recognisably
scientific approach to the generational theme – Karl Mannheim – was quick to identify the problems
of a purely demographic conception of the term. He rejected the notion generations might be
defined exclusively by reference to ‘naturalistic’ data like birth-dates, arguing a more complete
understanding must involve social factors, in particular shared experiences and events (Mannheim,
1952, p.381). ‘It is not difficult to see why mere chronological contemporaneity cannot of itself
produce a common generation location.
No one, for example, would assert that there was
community of location between the young people of China and Germany about 1880. Only where
contemporaries definitely are in a position to participate as an integrated group in certain common
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experiences can we rightly speak of community of location of a generation’ (Mannheim 1952,
pp.388-9). Yet the link to naturalistic data was never severed, and the concept of generation we have
inherited retains this ambiguity, being susceptible either to a more materialist reading emphasising
the primacy of demographic facts (the generation as a cohort defined by birth rates, or as that
cohort’s place in the life-cycle, as in ‘the older generation’) or a more culturalist reading (the
generation as those marked by an historical event or sequence) (Jaeger 1985; Kerzter 1983; Spitzer
1973, Rintala 1963).1
That Mannheim felt moved to analyse the idea of generation in the mid-twentieth century
affirms his own ideas about the importance of events and cultural experiences in cultivating
generational sensitivity. In addition to the long-term social changes described, the events of the
world wars accentuated time-based social differentiation, producing a perceived separation between
those who experienced its brutalities first-hand and those who experienced it vicariously or who
knew only the post-war settlement. The writings of such theorists follow on from a wider cultural
tendency in 1920s and early 1930s Europe to reflect on the ‘generation of 1914’ (Wohl 1979), one of
the high-points of generationalist thinking. The twentieth century saw several further moments of
heightened generational awareness: ‘1968’ and ‘1989’ were likewise commonly refracted through a
generational lens, familiarising such terms as ‘the sixties generation’ or ‘the communist generation’.
Later we shall examine the significance of recent events, including the 2008- financial crisis,
for current interest in the generational view. First, however, let us say more on the extent of it.2 The
generational emphasis can be found across a variety of speakers – those of Left and Right, of young
and old, and in political as well as journalistic circles. Our selection of texts is designed to probe
this diversity.3 Beyond the aforementioned books (Beckett 2010; Willetts 2010; Howker and Malik
2010) and related works (Willetts 2005, 2006, 2007), a wide range of publications foregrounding
Note the possibility of transfer between categories – things initially said to affect ‘the young’ may retrospectively, as
that cohort ages, come to be seen as affecting a specific generation. See also generations as marked by institutions – the
school, army, bureaucracy, or youth movement – and individuals, e.g. the ‘John Paul II generation’ (JP2), much
discussed in Poland and Catholic forums such as the World Youth Day. An evocative notion of generation sees it as ‘a
magnetic field at the centre of which lies an experience or a series of experiences’ (Wohl 1979, p.210).
2
For the full list of primary sources, see the reference list below.
3
In class terms, however, we may be dealing with a fairly delimited set – generally, the urban middle-classes – and it
remains to be seen how far these narratives have a broader resonance. As Wohl notes of the generationalists of early
twentieth-century Europe, ‘almost always literary intellectuals living in large cities’ (Wohl 1979, p.4).
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generations as the analytical unit have appeared, including: Radical Future: Politics for the Next
Generation (Little, 2010), an essay collection featuring mainly twenty-something authors affiliated
to universities and political associations; and It’s All Their Fault: A Manifesto (Boorman 2010), a
pamphlet by journalist Neil Boorman. Then there is the Radio 4 programme ‘The Jam Generation’,
presented by journalist Anne McElvoy, which charts ‘the growing influence of children of the 1980s
in politics’ (2011; cf. 2008).
There are also the statements of leading politicians, including
Chancellor George Osborne, whose August 2010 City speech included the contention that ‘fairness
extends across the generations, for what is fair about forcing the next generation to pay for the debts
of our generation?’ (Osborne 2010), and most recently Labour leader Ed Miliband, whose Royal
Festival Hall speech neatly ties some of these threads together with the warning that ‘The current
representatives of the Jam Generation are on course to create a jilted generation’ (Miliband 2011).4
Less prominent, but drawn on by several such authors as we shall see, are a range of technical and
academic discourses in economics and philosophy which likewise foreground the generational view.
The recurrence of cross-references indicates the worth of examining these texts together.
Other reasons to cluster them include their shared reliance on ‘generation’ as the central organising
concept,5 and their similarity in the issues they discuss – foremost among them issues of debt, higher
education, housing, pensions, welfare rights, and (sporadically) environmental protection. Note also
this outpouring of generation-related texts has itself been a topic of media discussion (e.g. Bunting
2010; Hari 2010; BBC 2010). We shall approach this material as a single corpus rather than a series
of isolated texts expected a priori to show internal coherence and sharp differentiation from one
another. Differences of theme and emphasis naturally emerge in the analysis, but these will be
examined mainly as (ideo)logical variations rather than variations between individual speakers. The
intention is thereby to go beyond narrow commentary to a deeper discussion of the ideational
framework with which authors are engaging.
4
A move towards the institutionalisation of generational discourse was the May 2011 establishment of the
Intergenerational Foundation, a London think-tank.
5
We take an inclusive approach which sees speakers invoking the generational idea when they make systematic
reference to the word ‘generation’ – even when, on some theoretical readings, the word is arguably being misused (e.g.
when ‘generations’ are elided with cohorts).
5
The paper’s focus is on generationalism rather than generations as such. It is not our goal to
formulate criteria by which to assess the reality of generations, the conditions for their emergence,
the qualities of a particular generation, or the sociological usefulness of the concept.
A rich
sociology exists on such questions, from Mannheim to the present (e.g. Eisenstadt 1964; Wyatt
1993; Eyerman and Turner 1998; Edmunds and Turner 2002; Burnett 2010). We focus instead on
appeals to the generational idea in public discourse, remaining broadly agnostic on their validity –
just as the student of nationalism can remain agnostic on the nationalist ontology. In principle, we
may assume generationalism sometimes appears in conjunction with the social formations it purports
to describe, also that it may produce these (‘generationalism before generations’, as it were), but
neither outcome is certain. Our focus is on ideas, in other words – though it is not purely discursive,
for we shall attend to the social and political context these emerge in.
Is generationalism today a specifically British phenomenon? It has long-standing visibility in
the US, where the relative recentness of the founding moment invites efforts to count back in time to
‘the beginning’ (Keller 1978; as exemplar, Howe and Strauss 1991). The evocation of the ‘babyboomers’ as a significant social group, and specifically their entwinement with debates on social
security, has been a feature of US public discourse since the 1980s (Binstock 2010; cf. below). But
generation-talk is widespread, and an equivalent analysis might be attempted for many European
countries today.6
Central Themes in Contemporary Generationalism
What and who constitutes a generation for today’s generationalists? Let us begin with definitional
issues. A point of convergence for our authors is that generations can be approached empirically.
They are social objects, things which can be identified in the particular instance, and thus be given
‘Gerontocracy’, for example, is a prominent idea in Italian public discourse; in Ireland, the ‘Celtic Tiger generation’ is
an increasingly familiar motif; in Germany, ‘Generation Golf’ has become a standard term for those born immediately
after the ‘baby-boomers’. Generationalism is arguably more entrenched in Germany than Britain, since the state pension
system has long been cast as an intergenerational transfer; the novelty of the present lies in the kind of generationalism
found, notably an increasing emphasis on intergenerational conflict rather than solidarity.
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names, not just alluded to in general, categorical form. Some authors mix concrete references of this
sort with more figurative references to unborn generations, but none argues generations must always
be considered in the abstract.
Beyond this basic methodological convergence, we find considerable disagreement on what
form they take. Crucial is the noted distinction between naturalist and culturist understandings.
Some of our texts are decidedly of the former kind, defining the ‘baby-boomers’ in demographic
terms according to two post-War spikes in births (Willetts 2010, intro, p.53). Willetts’ argument for
the ascendancy of the boomers focuses on numbers, principally the economic and political
advantages of belonging to a large cohort (the ability to dominate both state and market).7 Others,
while granting the centrality of the ‘boomers’, define them differently: Beckett approaches them as
those born in the ten, not twenty, years after 1945, and ties them more closely to cultural and
political developments. The demographic dimension is not absent – he criticises Willetts for being
inaccurate rather than excessive in his demographic account (2010, p.vii) – but their generational
character is traced to their early experiences of post-War austerity and social conservatism. The
demographic definition is secondary to the type of cultural critique Beckett wishes to make.
Boorman, who wishes to make sweeping condemnations of ‘the boomers’, picks the longer timerange, but with an emphasis on their moral failings rather than structural characteristics. That these
authors disagree on the date-range underlines the interpretative character even of naturalistic
definitions. Other texts focus not on the baby-boomers but on generations that cannot be defined by
demographic criteria. The ‘jilted generation’ of which Howker and Malik, and later Miliband, speak,
is defined less by numerical data than shared experiences and cultural reference-points. Howker and
Malik refer to them also as the ‘post-79 generation’ (p.3), thus characterising them as those who
have had to pay university tuition fees. There is no consensus, one quickly learns, on who’s who in
the generational scheme. Variations occur even in the single text: much of Jilted Generation speaks
merely of ‘young people’ generally, a phrase which – like Willets’ ‘younger generation’ – is abstract
and suggests the difficulty of naming them. Moreover, the phrase conjures an age-cohort. That
7
No doubt a strictly demographic view has particular appeal for those, like Willetts, engaged in public policy, since it
lends calculability to the issues involved and an ostensible solidity and persuasiveness to the judgements made.
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these authors wish to dress their concerns in the generational lingo more than their arguments require
is a point we shall return to.
Historically, generationalists have differentiated themselves not just by the importance they
accord naturalistic features but by the inclusivity of the generations they evoke (Jaeger 1985).
Generations can be imagined in parochial fashion – e.g. generations of artists – or in global fashion –
e.g. a generation of the country as a whole. With some exceptions (e.g. the domain-specific ‘Jam
generation’, a phenomenon of the political class), our texts converge in evoking expansive
generations. Bar the occasional qualification, ‘baby-boomers’ are cast as all those of a certain age,
and the ‘jilted generation’ as all those reaching maturity.
They are mass rather than elite
phenomena. Inclusive formulations of this kind are perhaps typically late-modern: Burnett talks of
the ‘democratisation’ of generations in the twentieth century (2010, pp.58ff.), though as we shall
argue there is something distinctly un-pluralist about them. Certainly there is no lack of ambition in
these deployments of the generational idea: it is being used for grand effect.
We see this clearly as we examine the salient themes that recur in these texts. Let us focus
on five, all of which appear in multiple texts.
1. The first is a scientific one: generations are evoked as historical explanations, social facts that
influence history’s course. Whether defined demographically or in terms of experiences and
dispositions, they are presented as causally significant. In Beckett’s account, generations matter
because recent political trends have their origins in the shared experiences of those growing up in
the 1950s: the two leaders of New Labour when in government, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown,
are cast as Britain’s two baby-boomer prime ministers, and the perceived directionlessness of
their government linked to the emptiness and pseudo-radicalism of the 1960s milieu they
matured in and the disciplinarian schooling they were reacting against. These boomer leaders
were quite different from the ‘war babies’ of an earlier (Old) Labour generation, Neil Kinnock
and John Smith (Beckett 2010, p.159). Generations matter because the tendencies that shape
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them can explain present developments: they are one of the mechanisms by which the past leaves
its legacy. Willetts’ is equally clear on the status of generations as drivers of change:
‘Be it the effects of globalisation on wages, the shift to lower inflation, the impact of improved life
expectancy, or the house price boom, the baby boomers seem to have had all the luck. Or is there more to
it than that? Being a big generation gives you a lot of power. Your large cohort will dominate
marketplaces. You will be kings and queens amongst consumers. Elections will be pitched to you. In fact
your values and tastes will shape the world around you – you will be able to spend your life in a
generational bubble, always outvoting and outspending the generations before and after you. That is what
it means to be a baby boomer ….’ (2010, p.83)
There is an ambiguity here which is characteristic of the text: were the ‘boomers’ merely lucky,
or did they engineer their luck?
Either way, their causal impact is clear: they and their
demographic make-up have ‘shaped’ the world around them, determining through their
preferences the country’s cultural and political landscape (see also 2010, p.67). They are facts of
primary significance (Jaeger 1985), not just the product of wider forces.
2. Not all uses of the generational concept to evoke an historical context have explanatory intent. A
second trope is their deployment for periodisation purposes, to locate phenomena in a larger
timescape and mark the evolution of society at large. The idea of the ‘Jam Generation’ refers to
those MPs who came of age in the 1980s in the heyday of the rock group The Jam. Rather than
to emphasise the influence of the music on their politics, the purpose is seemingly to delineate a
collective and evoke a Zeitgeist to which it belongs. It is a way of ordering history, of making it
intelligible. It involves putting a face on an otherwise faceless past or present, clustering a
variety of beliefs and dispositions to evoke a collective protagonist.8 Such a move may be
accompanied by an emphasis on rupture and renewal – the ‘Jam Generation’ are taking over the
reins of the Conservative Party and of British government from the baby-boomers, clearing out
the old and ushering in the new, promising a form of national catharsis. Alternatively, the
emphasis may be on rupture and decline – a sub-theme in Beckett’s account is how far Britain
and its Labour Party have fallen since the days of the post-War welfare settlement. In each case,
generations are here expressive of social change rather than determinative of it.
Different in this regard are alternative vocabularies such as ‘ages’ (e.g. the nuclear age) and ‘decades’ (e.g. ‘the
sixties’), which do not evoke a collective subject in the same fashion, referring rather to a temporal context.
8
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3. A third theme is that of generations as a source of community. Elements of this we have already
seen, as moves to periodise the past in generational terms are likely to involve constructing
collective identities to which individuals supposedly feel attachment. Just as territorial location
may act as a focal-point for people’s feelings of togetherness and belonging, so the thought is
temporal location may do the same.
Several of these texts play on this idea: the ‘jilted
generation’, besides being another musical reference,9 is an idea targeted at a certain age-group
to encourage them to locate themselves and their experiences in a collective frame: ‘you are not
alone’ are the book’s final words (Howker and Malik 2010, p.223). As we shall see later, this
effort to evoke collective subjecthood can be seen at the same time as an effort to mobilise.
The generational idea can also be used to suggest connectedness across periods, to evoke
links in a chain. It brings with it a family metaphor: the idea of society as the kin group writ
large, or an ensemble of kin groups in synchrony.10 Several of the texts cast the relationship
between generations as that between parents and children, often mixing references to ‘your
parents’ and ‘our parents’ (e.g. Boorman 2010, p.6). Aside from the theme of conflict we shall
come to, such references produce a sense of the links between one cohort and the next (in a way
the term cohort itself, or ‘age-group’, does not) and of the larger whole to which each belongs.
Here is Miliband talking about ‘the promise of Britain’:
‘My belief [is] that we can and must create a better life for the next generation. My concern, like millions
of others, is that for the first time for more than a century, the next generation will struggle to do better than
the last. In the past we took it for granted that if we worked hard, if our children worked hard, they would
be more prosperous, and have greater opportunities. But the last few decades have begun to show that the
promise to the next generation, the promise to our children, what I call the promise of Britain, cannot now
be taken for granted. Today I want to set out the scale of the problem as I see it, and why it matters – not
just to those affected, but for the whole country. And how I see it as the duty of my generation of
politicians to answer this challenge. As a parent, like all parents, I judge myself on the opportunities my
children will have – and the happiness that can provide. As Prime Minister, I will judge the next Labour
government on the opportunities that Britain can provide for all of the next generation.’
The family metaphor is prominent, as is the link between the small family of kin relations and
the big family of the country at large. Our children are ‘ours’ both directly and figuratively.
9
To an album by The Prodigy.
Rawls’ efforts to conceive intergenerational justice are an influential example of this tendency: it is via the futureoriented concerns of ‘heads of household’ that the intergenerational view is developed (Rawls 1971).
10
10
Whereas to talk about ‘the present’ and ‘the future’ would be a highly abstract move, talking
about ‘us’ and ‘our children’ puts a face on both. Note the hint of a volkisch perspective – the
country as a series of interlocked, kin-like generations. As a ‘story of peoplehood’ (Smith 2003),
it resembles certain ideas of nationhood, evoking a larger structure within which the constituent
parts are arranged.11 Distinctively, it evokes the relation of the present not just to the past but to
the future, and has built into it a sense of both continuity and change.
4. A fourth theme is that of generations as a means to identify injustice. Some of our writers
(notably Willetts) are explicitly influenced by philosophical debates on intergenerational justice,
and most have normative points to make. Generation here functions as a way to imagine crossage and cross-temporal obligations, a way to highlight the moral embeddedness of an age-related
group (to others in the moving present) or of all those alive at a given time (to those of the past
and future) (cf. Miliband). It can evoke the culpable and the deserving.12 Ideas of sacrifice and
neglect are present in several texts: whether due to their concerted selfishness or a series of illjudged decisions, the baby-boomers have concentrated wealth in their hands and produced a
‘lost’ or ‘jilted’ youth. ‘Generation’ acts as an amplifier, highlighting the way this suffering and
injustice afflicts large numbers. For Howker and Malik, for whom generations are effects rather
than causes, the problems of the young must be recognised as societal injustices rather than
sectoral grievances. The generational idea functions to broaden our conception of the common
good: ‘… this book isn’t really about us [the young]. It’s not just about one dissatisfied group in
society, a whinge by one generation about another. That would be wrong. This book is about
our country’s future and our need to safeguard it from those who thought that today was more
important than tomorrow …’ (Howker and Malik 2010, p.223). Generationalism thus acts as a
moral language with which to identify injustice and seek its rectification.
Beckett’s title – what did the baby-boomers ever do for us? – is suggestive here: it implies a superordinate ‘we’, the
nation or family as a whole, to which individual generations either contribute or fail to.
12
The use of the generation-concept to construct a morally responsible collective perpetrator of misdeeds can be seen in
post-communist societies, where one still frequently hears mention of a ‘communist generation’. It is a kind of othering
of responsibility onto the past and those associated with it; also an act of consigning them to the past.
11
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5. Our final theme is the related one of social division: generation as an axis of conflict and
impending crisis. As we have seen, one encounters the idea that more than one generation is
alive simultaneously.13 Specifically, a division between the ‘baby-boomers’ and today’s young
is a recurrent idea. In many of these texts conflict between them appears as a prediction; in
others, as an incitement. Underpinning this is the thought that the older of the two groups has
systematically skewed the economic structure in its favour, whether by building an unsustainable
welfare state or by failing to make the sacrifices necessary to maintain it.
Beckett, who
highlights negligence, concludes ‘there is a generation war emerging. Wealth is being sucked up
the age ladder, and the young have to struggle harder than they did before’ (Beckett 2010, p.xv;
pp.190ff). Willetts, whose assessment of the welfare state is more negative, likewise sees
conflict approaching: ‘if the younger generation feel they have had a raw deal they will not
protect the boomers in their old age. It is the contract between the generations which binds these
two interests together’ (p.xx). Even Howker and Malik, who are careful to argue the challenges
facing today’s youth have been created less by a guilty generation than by ‘British society more
generally’ (2010, p.4; pp.145-6), nonetheless see intergenerational conflict as a likely prospect
(p.15). This notion of conflict chimes with the family connotations we have described: if the
parent-child relation is generally assumed to be founded on responsibility and love, a familiar
counter-theme is that of conflict and rebellion. Boorman’s text in particular plays on this idea,
albeit reversing the traditional roles, such that it is the responsible young who are rebelling
against their irresponsible, spendthrift parents.
One way this notion of conflict is elaborated is by evoking baby-boomers as an interestgroup able to shape electoral outcomes to their advantage, whether through lobbying or blocvoting. Sometimes this is presented as an empirical fact – generations are interest-groups, and
democracy is about who speaks loudest – and sometimes as a belief politicians hold, real in its
consequences if not in its premises. As Little puts it in Radical Future (2010, p.8), in a sentence
13
Here is an ambiguity of the generational idea: used to denote age-groups, the co-presence of generations is a logical
implication; used to denote periods in time, it may contrast the ‘living generation’ with ‘past’ and ‘future generations’, as
discussions of intergenerational justice often do.
12
readable either way, ‘our problem is that Britain’s young people are demographically cut off
from a political class that focuses on the most electorally significant group: middle-aged, middleclass, middle England’ (cf. Howker and Malik 2010, pp.155ff.; Willetts 2010, p.250). Insofar as
some of these authors wish to produce generational conflict – probably true of Boorman, whose
piece features ‘Manifesto’ in the title and whose text revels in the language of ‘them and us’,
likewise of Penny in Radical Future, and possibly of Howker and Malik (provisional title: A
Manifesto for the Jilted Generation) – the suggestion is that if the young become conscious of
the situation they face, they may be able to tackle the boomers head-on. Through generational
conflict, then, lies the route to the redress of generational injustices.
Five themes of contemporary generationalism have been identified: generations as historical
explanations, as ways to catalogue time, as sources of community; as ways to identify injustice; and
as an axis of conflict and impending crisis. Many of these resemble the themes found in historical
manifestations of generationalism. The idea of unjust suffering concentrated on a single generation,
and its conflictual relationship with elders, is a familiar one, played out in the 1930s in the context of
the Great Depression (Wohl 1979, p.206). Likewise it was to be found after World War 1, in
discussions of the ‘lost generation’ of soldiers sacrificed in the trenches by an arrogant and
misguided older generation of generals (Wohl 1979).14 In Kriegel’s confident words, ‘generational
specificity is itself a fiction: in truth, all successive generations resemble each other in their laments
as in their triumphs. Is there even one which, in times of depression, has not called itself a lost
generation?’ (Kriegel p.34). On themes of justice and conflict, there seems to be some consistency
with generationalisms past.
Yet Kriegel refers also to ‘triumphs’, and of these we have heard little. Themes of mission
and achievement are largely absent.15 The young are described mainly as victims, the aged as a
problem, and the ‘boomers’ precisely so as to puncture some of the positive ideas conventionally
See Wohl 1979, p.205 on youth as ‘a superior and privileged stage of life, beyond which lay degeneration. Its enemies
were adulthood and adults, who were connected with a crass and decadent society.’
15
The 1960s make a suitable contrast: generationalism then was marked by a concern to underline that period’s historical
prestige (cf. Graubard 1978, p.vi).
14
13
associated with them (e.g. the ‘68ers’ as campaigners for liberty and equality).
In describing
portrayals of the ‘generation of 1914’, Wohl highlights the themes of ‘uniqueness, loss, sacrifice,
and mission’ (1979, p.39). While the first three have clear echoes today, the idea of a generational
mission sounds alien. There is nothing heroic or world-historical about the generations evoked in
today’s discourse, and it is not by their projects they are defined.16 That generations may be a source
of collective identity and belonging is acknowledged, but this identity is presented as one of mere
fate, of happening to share the same place in time, rather than one of shared vision and purpose.17
Their normative significance is restricted to their ability to embody forms of injustice. Generationtalk today, in all its various forms, generally does not cast the young as the motor of change or the
vanguard of progress. Indeed, it struggles to name them, resorting frequently to their ‘youngness’.
They have humble, non-radical ambitions – they want to get on in life. They are cast as wading into
an uncertain, but certainly dangerous, future: their ingenuousness prolonged by their being denied
the opportunities associated with maturity. Someday they will rebel, but few signs are yet observed.
Where agency is evoked, it is ascribed to yesterday’s generations. The boomers had agency, as the
explanatory motif, the willingness to castigate them, and the ease of naming them, all suggest (albeit
agency of a limited kind – cf. our final section below). But the generations of the present and future
are cast mainly as objects rather than subjects. Contemporary generationalism tends to express the
sovereignty of the past over the present.
Perhaps there is another specificity of today’s generationalism, which we may describe as its
relationship to the ‘decisive moment’. A sense of foreboding pervades most of these texts. The full
significance of the generational fact is yet to manifest, the final reckoning still to come. Willetts
tells us ‘the real pension crisis has not yet happened though it is rolling towards us with horrible
inevitability’, with the decisive moment when ‘the real battle over resources begins’ projected into
the future, sometime ‘over the next decades’ (2010, p.247).
16
Howker and Malik advise that
Burnett (2010) makes relevant points here (albeit with little distinction between generations and generationalism),
contrasting the ‘epic’ generations of the early-twentieth century with the ‘consumption’ generations that followed, the
latter defined mainly by tastes and market activity. This distinction is useful, but misses the tragic note in contemporary
generationalism: the ‘jilted generation’ and ‘the young’ are defined by their suffering, not merely their style preferences.
17
The exception is the talk in Miliband of his political generation’s responsibility to ‘provide opportunities’ for the next
generation. It is a rather ill-defined, modest vision perhaps, but does mark a departure from earlier contributions to this
discourse – indeed, may be understood as a deliberate effort to contest the bleakness of contemporary generationalism.
14
‘something might be about to go horribly wrong’ (2010, p.9) and that ‘slowly, sombrely, inevitably,
the storm is gathering pace’ (2010, p.15). Boorman can put a figure on it: ‘650 days. That’s roughly
how long we’ve got until a time bomb goes off in this country [when the boomers begin entering
retirement]’ (2010, p.2). Beyond a feel for the dramatic – as all horror-film-makers know, things are
most scary when imminent but as yet unseen – one may read this partly as a bid for credibility.
Today’s generationalism – unlike those of the past which rode on the back of a mass movement (e.g.
Young Italy, or the Young Turks) – must cope with the low visibility of much it describes, be it agerelated impoverishment, collective identity, injustice, future degradation, or conflict. By pushing the
decisive moment back, scepticism about their reality can be alleviated. At the same time, the move
expresses a conscious effort to widen the temporal horizon and incorporate what lies ahead into the
generational scheme. Today’s generationalism is strongly oriented to the future – even if that future
is treated as a linear extension of the past.
On the popularity of generational narratives
One can give at least two kinds of account for the appeal of the generational idea. One focuses on
structural factors – factors irreducible to individual goals – which create an inviting context for
generational thinking. Such factors are not directly causal, any more than a well located hill by a
river was ever responsible for the founding of a town. But they may give us some general insight
into questions of where and why. Another set focuses on the political context in which these
narratives emerge.
While precise motives are difficult to pin on individuals, who may have
compound as well as idiosyncratic motivations, examining these contexts can usefully illuminate
how generation-talk fits with different kinds of political orientation.18
18
There is of course the sceptical position that regards generationalism as nothing more than a fashion, i.e. a randomlyformed pattern of behaviour replicated by acts of imitation with no sense to them other than the desire to conform to the
emerging pattern. Little can be said to refute such a perspective, except to note that fashions generally last but a season –
precisely because they are senseless and become boring – and that the texts we are examining straddle at least five years.
15
We have anticipated some of the macro factors likely to heighten sensitivity to generational
thinking. Society’s relationship to technology is one: continued advances in capacity are likely to
heighten awareness of time’s passing. What was true of mechanisation in the nineteenth century –
the appearance of the train, car and plane – is likely to hold true of digitalisation in the twenty-first.
The arrival in successive waves of the personal computer, the internet, the mobile phone, and a
whole series of software innovations which drive the evolution of these formats (e.g. social
networking websites) have no doubt contributed to a cultural inclination to periodise. The concept
of generation offers an easy method, and phrases such as ‘digital generation’ abound.19 To this point
we may add another foreshadowed earlier concerning the relative appeal of alternative forms of
collective identification. It is commonly suggested the late twentieth-century exhibited a weakening
of class-related attachments. Western societies are said to be meritocratic, and class issues therefore
passé. An emphasis on generations may then be seen as born of the need to find new ways to narrate
the social when alternative metrics are believed no longer to apply. It is unclear whether the idea of
generations has greater public resonance than the categories it is said to supersede, but as a narrative
device it appears in tune with the times – as generationalists themselves highlight (Willetts 2007).
Today’s generationalism can be seen as fostered also by long-term commercial trends. The
language of generations has been seized on in recent decades as a way of selling consumer goods. It
is a means to create and target niche markets (Edmunds and Turner 2002, p.4). It is also a means to
elevate the status of the product: the ‘Pepsi Generation’ advertising campaign of the 1960s pioneered
a new model of ‘lifestyle marketing’, in which the consumer is enticed not just with the qualities of
the product but with the way of life associated to it – in this case cool and youthful living (Frank
1998). Categories such as the ‘baby-boomers’ or ‘the sixties generation’ can be said to have
increased their profile through the efforts of marketers to use generational identity and its attendant
imagery to sell things (e.g. various forms of 1960s nostalgia). Today’s generationalism may be seen
as capitalising on this legacy, either for commercial motives – e.g. book publishers pushing
generational packaging because it sells, and the media because it increases audience figures – or for
19
Admittedly, unless one assumes technological change accelerates in certain periods, one has little reason to single out
some periods in the modern age as more conducive to generation-talk than others.
16
political motives. Generationalism may be seen as one of the many ways politics increasingly
resembles a marketing exercise. Plainly it is not just an advertising phenomenon – many of our
selected texts are produced and reproduced in non-commercial settings (e.g. on blogs) – but
undoubtedly this is a favourable climate.
Beyond these quite general factors, one obvious candidate explanation for the popularity of
generationalism is the realist one that certain material facts demand such a perspective be taken.
This is the argument embedded in some of the texts in question, particularly the naturalistic ones.20
Willetts’ contention is that society will fail to get to grips with various social problems if it does not
recognise their demographic origins in the sheer size of certain cohorts. 2011-12 has long been
heralded as the moment the ‘baby-boomers’ will enter retirement: this, it is said, will put
unprecedented strain on public finances, pension systems in particular. Generational thought can
then be seen as an effort to talk coherently about these pressing demands, to think about the past,
present and future in a manner less abstract and impersonal than these terms themselves provide.
Howker and Malik are explicit on the point that ‘new words’ are needed if public discourse is to take
future-oriented concerns seriously (2010, p.204): their book can be seen as an effort to advance the
generational concept as one. Climate change might be seen as another material factor forcing the
agenda. While these texts generally say little on the topic, notions of ‘sustainability’ are drawn on
by several, and the influence of developments in environmental economics (notably promoted in
Britain by the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change) is acknowledged.
Generational-talk may thus be seen as inspired in part by pressing real-world concerns. Moreover,
one may suppose some of its popularity derives from the belief that most people under-value these
concerns – that the realities are not taken seriously.
Yet facts do not speak for themselves, and one must emphasise the selectivity with which
authors choose those conducive to generational thinking.
There are many intra-generational
cleavages which remain at least as important as intergenerational ones (Kohli 2006). There are also
numerous parallel empirical trends which do not sit well with generational thinking: declining rates
Culturalist perspectives such as Beckett’s can equally assert their empiricism, treating as a basic truth that age-groups
are imprinted with ideas internalised during formative years. His text is confessedly impressionistic however.
20
17
of marriage, increasing rates of divorce, increasing rates of single parenting, and increasing rates of
step-siblings widely separated in age, all blur the boundaries of the family unit and reduce the
plausibility of thinking in terms of separable age-groups. It may be that some of our generationalists
are more interested in nuclear families, but if so they are not moved exclusively by empirical
concerns. Note also that generationalism is not the only way to evoke a cross-temporal perspective:
‘future people’, ‘the future of the country’, ‘of the state’ or ‘of humanity’ are formulations that
achieve something similar. One does not need to be a generationalist to take the larger view.
The significance of events inevitably needs consideration when charting the rise of
generationalism – moments when long-term developments are set into relief, creating an opening for
the promotion of ideas. The 2008- financial crisis would seem especially relevant – a landmark
event cleaving past and present, potentially building generational consciousness in the way some
have seen September 11th 2001 as giving birth to a new ‘September generation’(Edmunds and
Turner 2002). Not only does the financial crisis seem likely to strongly effect certain age cohorts in
particular (e.g. through youth unemployment), but it heralds a series of landmark political decisions
of major consequence for the country’s future. Notions of a ‘lost generation’ are easily evoked.
Whether or not 2008 genuinely has the status of a world-historical event is not the point: it is enough
that it presents itself as one to those who cannot be sure. Admittedly, Willetts has been speaking on
intergenerational themes since at least 2005, so the financial crisis must be considered an
opportunity as much as cause. Indeed, one must question whether generationalism and ‘the event’
are easily separated, for the latter – particularly one that is ongoing and poorly understood – is an
ambiguous phenomenon partly constituted exactly by such interpretative moves as the former. The
argument becomes stronger if one extends it to include a further event broadly coterminous (one
which, because predictable, is likely to have been more influential in the long-term planning of
generationalist texts). 2010 was general election year – an election in which a change of government
was widely predicted. Generationalism may be seen as the product of this political rupture amplified
by the socio-economic one. Importantly, the political one can be distilled to a single, dramatic
18
moment, whereas the socio-economic one is largely diffuse both in appearance and consequences. It
is in combination that the two achieve resonance.
These accounts treat generationalism as symptomatic of macro-social developments. Each
indicates why it may have general contemporary appeal, but is limited in what it can say about
substance, notably about the prominence of the aforementioned themes. A fuller account requires us
to examine how generationalism fits with the political orientations and agendas of those who
articulate it. Clearly we are not looking for a motivation common to all actors, nor one which is the
exclusive motive for any individual. Indeed, a cognitive focus on the individual and his / her
motivation is unlikely to convince: individuals may have compound motivations, and efforts to
separate and rank these will be speculative. What we must look for is the range of reasons on which
actors may draw based on the political context in which they operate.21
It follows from our earlier observations that the generational concept is likely to have appeal
for those wanting to see social change (Graubard 1978, p.v). As an idea premised on the reality or
likelihood of change (without which generations are indiscernible), it can also be seen as a way of
encouraging it, and of discouraging resistance. One sees something of this in McElvoy’s radio
series, in which the emphasis on the ‘Jam generation’ functions in part to mark a dividing line with
the ‘baby boomers’ Blair and Brown and to consign these latter to the past. It is a way of casting the
familiar as no longer relevant and of heralding the new. Certainly this thought seems present in the
Boorman text, where ‘the young’ are being incited to vote baby-boomer MPs out of office,
irrespective of their party allegiance. The generational idea is a way of encouraging people to ‘move
on’ and accept the arrival of change. Willetts is explicit that the generational idea is a way of
positioning his party as forward-looking and receptive to change, not blindly conservative as the
name would suggest.22
21
We exclude reasons predominantly private in character: e.g. use of a generational narrative because the author
him/herself claims to be of the generation described, allowing a claim to insight and authority based on ‘insider’ status.
Many of the texts use this motif, notably Beckett, McElvoy and Howker and Malik.
22
Willetts 2007: ‘Labour have got away with living in the present because people thought Tories were stuck in the past.
The challenge for us is to be the party of the future.’
19
The desire for a very specific form of change can be associated with several contemporary
generationalists (emphatically not all): the recasting and trimming of the welfare state.
To
understand this in full we must look first to the United States, where politically motivated
applications of the discourse of ‘intergenerational equity’ have an older pedigree. The effort to
introduce generation-based dividing lines regarding the impact of welfare redistribution has been a
familiar practice of critics of state intervention since the 1980s. In its crudest form, this has involved
the promulgation of stereotypes of the elderly as ‘prosperous, hedonistic, politically powerful, and
selfish’ (Binstock 2010, p.576), in place of previously more benign images dating to the classical
period of Social Security from the 1930s to 1970s. The ‘boomers’ are cast as a selfish and decadent
generation, and the vaguely leftist sixties’ ideals they are associated with presented as licentious,
narcissistic and unsustainable. In more rationalist terms, the argument has been that state transfers
funnel wealth upwards from young to old. Organisations such as Americans for Generational Equity
(AGE), funded by corporate groups and Republican politicians, were instrumental in advancing the
idea of zero-sum generation-based divisions in which the elderly are a drain on collective resources
(Quadagno 1990) (Kohli 2006). Disaggregating the system into winners and losers invites the
individual to ask which category they belong to, something presumably intended to encourage
significant numbers either to reject institutionalised social sharing outright or to call for a more
individualised model in which gains and losses are spread over the individual life-course. While
AGE did not survive, its legacy and that of like-minded groups was the thematisation in public
debate of generational conflict and its relevance to welfare planning, a theme revitalised in the 1990s
as the baby-boomers edged towards retirement (Howe and Strauss 1991; Peterson 1999). An
emphasis on the power of a well-organised elderly ‘lobby’, as well as the cohort’s voting power, was
used to give urgency to these concerns. New methods of representing state expenditure so as to
distinguish contributors and beneficiaries in age-related terms – ‘generational accounting’ (Kotlikoff
1992) – have further institutionalised the generational view. Naturally, that support of the elderly
may also benefit society at large – and that cutting welfare entitlements places a burden on the
20
young, who may need to finance the care of family members directly – were ideas less discussed, as
was the reality of bloc voting (Arber and Attias-Donfut 2000).
This neo-conservative23 agenda seems clearly present in some of the generationalist texts
under consideration, notably those by Willetts (whose book emerged shortly before the
Conservatives entered government) and certain think-tanks.24
In The Pinch, the emphasis on
demographic demands combined with the suggestion that intergenerational conflict is approaching
communicate the point that things cannot remain as they are – the pension system particularly. That
the welfare state funnels wealth towards the old is a key part of Willetts’ explanatory narrative and
the basis for his identification of injustice (Willetts 2010, pp.158ff.) There is a clear willingness to
use the concept of generation to ask the ‘who costs what’ question, highlighting social divisions
between the economically productive and unproductive.25
That the ‘boomers’ are a greedy
generation is repeatedly hinted at, if rather coyly (2010, p.xxi, for the image of a ‘selfish giant’).
The idea of bloc voting is broadly endorsed (Willetts 2010, p.249, 251). The effect of such ideas,
presumably not unintended, is to suggest state pension provisions are excessively generous. Things
cannot remain as they are, and tough choices will be necessary. Intergenerational conflict, as we
have seen, is a theme repeatedly invoked – not, presumably, so as to foment it, but so as to use the
prospect of this decisive moment as a means to nudge people towards the putatively more
harmonious world that would be achieved if that which fuels the coming conflict – the welfare state
– were restructured. Whereas the explanatory theme is needed to give credibility and inevitability to
the necessity of change, the conflict theme is needed to give urgency.
But Willetts, as we have seen, has more than a scare-story or conspiracy theory to offer. The
argument is more sophisticated, for it includes explicitly moral appeals, and uses motifs of injustice
to speak not just to ‘the young’ but to ‘baby-boomers’ themselves. He wants to suggest the welfare
state is the agent of unfair privilege, and that keeping provisions as they are is not just impractical
but immoral – indeed, immoral to the degree that anyone calling for it would surely be motivated by
23
As a language of change, it is likely to be uncomfortable to a classical conservative oriented to tradition.
E.g. the right-wing think-tank Reform, which has published widely on pensioners and the ‘IPOD generation’.
25
See Willetts, Radio 4 Analysis programme, 21st June 2010: ‘It looks as if the baby boomers are going to be taking out
from the welfare state significantly more than they put in. 118 percent of what they put in is one estimate. Whereas for
the younger generation, they may get out less than they put in.’
24
21
self-interest not principle (2010, p.250). (Recall how Osborne treats as a moral injunction that debts
should not be deferred to future generations.) Opposition is thus discredited as small-minded.
Herein lies the place of the justice theme. By drawing on the philosophy of intergenerational justice,
Willetts produces a message well in tune with the liberal conservatism ascendant in the Tory party:
one which speaks not just the Thatcherite language of ‘no alternatives’ but a language of moral
persuasion. Change is presented as not just demographically inevitable but philosophically just.
Much of the generationalism we have looked at has a moralising character. This is most
clear in Boorman, who titles each of his sections with a moral vice, and who casts responsibility for
the financial crisis specifically on people of a certain age (2010, pp.17ff.), but it emerges repeatedly
in Willetts too, whose title ‘the pinch’ has echoes of theft, and in a quite different form it is present
in the Miliband passage cited. Beyond a means to prompt change, this can also be read as an effort
to create safe targets for public anger, particularly in a time of crisis. First, while acknowledging the
reality of social suffering and discontent, it focuses attention on people rather than structures,
something always like to produce a less fundamental type of critique. In this way, outcomes which
might properly be seen as the product of political decisions and the institutional structures emerging
from these – including the selling off of public housing, the under-construction of new homes, and
under-taxation – are displaced onto the shoulders of an age-group, sometimes described as ‘your
parents’. Even if we are invited to express disgust at their behaviour, such hostility is unlikely to
become disruptive, since the young may retain the hope they too will enjoy these benefits when their
time comes, and since they are isolated in their predicament and encouraged to expect limited
solidarity from their elders. A wider coalition of resistance is made to seem implausible. Second, a
focus on generations deflects public attention away from other social divisions. It deflects from
those of ethnos for instance, reducing the likelihood that non-white groups are made the scape-goats
for social problems such as crime or lack of housing (particularly in the context of perceived
growing support for far-right parties). It also deflects from those of class. The idea of generational
inequalities naturally implies that inequalities within generations are relatively insignificant: it is
consistent with themes of a ‘classless society’. As Willetts puts it (2010, p.23), ‘we think of haves
22
and have-nots now. But what if the haves are us now and the have-nots are our children and
grandchildren in the future?’ The thought prompts the conclusion that the ‘we’ of the present must
lift our eyes from petty concerns to do with the distribution of burdens amongst ourselves.
The
generational-conflict theme thus functions to contain other forms of conflict. Precisely because the
future extends indefinitely, it can be used to make the inequalities of the present seem trivial, and
concern with them blinkered and narrow-minded. Furthermore, the generational idea prompts the
idea that family members are the individual’s most relevant point of comparison, ensuring whatever
comparisons follow are unlikely to dwell on cross-class differences. And by declaring that the
coming age will be the age of generational conflict, class conflict is portrayed as an anachronism 26 –
the generational metric thus serves its periodisation function.
Notice that many (though not all) of the social problems identified in these texts could
potentially have been framed in class terms. Housing is one: several authors suggest today’s young
are no longer able to purchase housing in the way their parents could. Instead of denominating this
in generational terms, one might have presented it as a shrinking of the property-holding class and an
expansion of the unpropertied. Such a diagnosis might point towards the conventional techniques of
wealth redistribution anathema to certain authors’ preference for a small state. Of course, it is not
just that certain individuals wish to avoid class conflict (though one imagines this to be the case):
there may be wider, cultural resistances to seeing such matters in class terms. To see concentrations
of property ownership as a class matter would involve individual families negotiating the idea that
children may belong to a lower class than their parents: that the parents are middle-class but the
children are not. It would mean confronting head-on the possibility of downward social mobility.
As well as being a distressing thought in the particular case, such a notion clashes with common
understandings of class as being a cultural as much as economic phenomenon. It is regarded as in
significant part a question of manners, capacities, virtues and vices inherited from parents, things so
deeply ingrained they cannot be extinguished by mere circumstance. One appeal of the generational
Cf. Willetts 2007, pushing class into the past: ‘In the old days we used to think of our society as divided by class and
economic interests. Now we increasingly worry about divisions based on identity and culture. There is another division,
and one which we politicians need to tackle – a clash of generations.’
26
23
narrative is that it leaves these ideas undisturbed, even in the face of keenly felt social problems. If
the challenge is cast as one of inter-generational decline, the intra-generational status of individuals
relative to each other can be preserved. The generational narrative allows a euphemisation of the
individual’s predicament.
There is a further dimension to casting issues of justice and the prospect of conflict in
generational terms, surely salient to several authors. With its overtones of family life and the moral
obligations owed by members of a kin group to one another, generationalism presents itself as a
discourse of national unity. It is a means to evoke community, to make society legible to itself,
without resorting to the chauvinistic traditions of ethnic nationalism. As we have seen, our speakers
generally evoke generations in inclusive rather than domain-specific ways: when Willetts and
Miliband speak of ‘our’ generational obligations, it is a highly encompassing ‘we’, sometimes even
referring to everyone alive today, and imploring action on behalf of undifferentiated ‘younger’ and
‘future’ generations. Such formulations fit neatly with a one-nation discourse, softening the dividing
lines which have conventionally challenged national unity.27 This is one way generationalism’s
community theme is put to work. Linking the backward and the forward gaze, it suggests the
continuity of a collective. That the generational scheme has overtones of renewal, sustainability and
gradual progress (cf. Miliband again) increases its appeal as a self-image of society.28
It would be misleading however to see generationalism as antithetical to class analysis.
While some may adopt it to circumvent class-based thinking, others may invoke it to achieve aims
consistent with it: i.e. to achieve collective mobilisation in support of an egalitarian agenda.
Amongst our selected authors, such a goal may be associated with the Radical Future group,
Howker and Malik, and Beckett. For these, the concept of generation appears to have the potential
to act as a new vocabulary of leftist activity, notwithstanding the quite different intentions of other
converts to the concept. We have noted already the occasional appearance of the term ‘manifesto’
(see also Penny 2010a). Probably few of our authors would self-describe as Marxist: some of their
27
Note again the flexibility of the generational idea: just as it can evoke conflict between co-existing generations, it can
evoke the unity of the present and externalise other generations and potential conflicts into the past and future.
28
These links to nationhood should not obscure the co-existence of a boundary-transcending, cosmopolitan impulse in
the generational concept when tied to events of global significance (Wohl 1979, p.3; Edmunds and Turner 2002, 2005).
24
stated goals are considerably less radical (e.g. the desire to make home ownership affordable) while
others are absent in Marxist thought (e.g. environmentalism). Nonetheless, one detects a similarity
with old-Left thinking, and sometimes an explicit combination of generational with class analysis
(e.g. Beckett 2010, p.16; Howker and Malik pp.111, 131). Here we see a quite different articulation
of the conflict, justice and community themes. Arguably the generational concept is being adopted
as a new language of collectivism, a way to speak to those presumed no longer reachable using class
language – due to their outright rejection of the category, or their willingness to self-identify as
middle-class. It is a form of interpellation (Althusser 1970), a way of naming those who struggle to
name themselves and asserting their commonality of experience. It is one of the few instances
where a sense of political possibility is projected onto the young. Here is Little in Radical Future:
A return to an old-left politics or even its language would be alien to many under thirty. Likewise, a politics of
youth will get us so far, only to be outgrown and become irrelevant to our middle-aged selves. What this means
is that we need to change not just our electoral system and political parties (important as that may be), but
change the way we think about politics. We can take the core values of the left – equality, justice, tolerance,
democracy – but not its structures or its models. While our generation is as diverse in its political outlook as it is
in its demographic makeup, there is an opportunity here to unite under a banner of clear and present need’
(pp.9-10).
For these authors, the concept of generation is not be confused with that of youth. Youth is rejected
as an inadequate category of collective mobilisation, since individuals can hope to outgrow the
problems of youth, displacing them onto others. The specificity of generational injustices, where
‘generation’ is used not to mean age-group but cohort, is that they continue to afflict the generation
even as it grows older: this is what makes the generational concept a promising means to inspire
responses aimed at structural change, and to highlight how the meritocratic ideal falls short. While
these accounts generally acknowledge generational identity as weak – a source of exasperation – it is
something to be cultivated for the future.
Today’s generationalism – with its themes of the generation as a motor of history, a metric of
time, a source of community; a dimension of justice, and an axis of (future) conflict – has something
to offer a variety of contemporary political perspectives. It offers a master-narrative for small-state
conservatives to present the necessity of changes to the welfare state, yet without appealing solely to
25
egotistical impulses. In place of Thatcherite individualism and authoritarianism, it offers a sense of
collective identity and the revitalisation of social ties; a means to tap the language of sustainability,
justice and fairness, yet to avoid the presentation of socio-economic problems in potentially
disruptive forms. At the same time it offers leftist figures a way to conjure solidaristic ties and to
mobilise against individualism and inequality as conventionally understood without resorting to the
language of class. For both centre-left and centre-right, it offers an image of national unity away
from the treacherous terrain of ethnic nationalism. Most generally, it offers a means to take distance
from the recent past – be it that of the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, or the country as a
whole – and to suggest the possibility of renewal. Refracted through generationalism, in other
words, we see the recent evolutions of Britain’s political landscape, and in the breadth of its appeal
we seem to see the emergence of a new master-narrative of political discourse.
That the generational idea offers something to both left and right may be a source of secondorder appeal, for this implies it can be used to address multiple audiences simultaneously. There is a
clear post-partisan gesture in Willetts’ simultaneous appeals to the traditions of both Burke and
Rawls. This broad appeal is in turn a source of frustration for those who would like to harness the
generational idea to a distinctive programme and use it to mobilise.
‘The narrative of
intergenerational fairness is the natural territory of the British left,’ writes Laurie Penny, ‘not the
conservative right.’ The idea has been co-opted by the adversary, something ‘real generational
activists’ must refuse (Penny 2010b).
Stress-Points in Generationalist Thought
Generationalism has come to the fore in a context generally thought of as democratic, advanced by
those who would describe themselves as democratic. Part of its appeal seems to lie in the way it
gives form to that elusive democratic concept of ‘the people’. Yet in the various applications we
have examined, certain points of tension with the wider democratic imaginary seem evident. Certain
26
things get hidden in the generational view. In this final section, we consider more closely how far
the generational scheme delivers a self-image of society consistent with democratic ideas of
collective self-rule.
Generationalism, when it takes an historical turn and seeks generations incarnate in the
world, tends to downplay the internal diversity of that which it anoints a generation. It has a
tendency to overlook the disagreements and contradictions which mark any temporal slice of society
– whether generations are defined by naturalistic or culturalist criteria. While intra-generational
differences can be acknowledged, the assumption must be that these are trivial compared to crossgenerational differences. The texts we have examined generally homogenise the attributes and
experiences of a given generation, focusing on a partial reality and generalising it to the whole.
Often that reality is a middle-class one: denunciations of the ‘baby-boomers’ are often denunciations
of a select few – those who enjoyed a university education without the need to pay tuition fees (when
approximately 10% went to university); those who were able to get a mortgage to buy a home (when
only a minority owned private property); those who had the economic and political power to make
the decisions which are today castigated (e.g. decisions about public spending).29 Despite the many
references to ‘our / your parents’, the real parents of many of today’s young would not have had
access to any of these. The face presented of the baby-boomers tends to be a middle-class face, and
those who were less advantaged within that cohort are largely ignored. Likewise in evocations of
the tragedy of today’s young, the focus is on those who aspire to these middle-class rewards but are
denied them. No doubt this has something to do with these interventions’ intended audience, and
that of the media channels, notably the broadsheet press and BBC Radio 4, which pick up on them.
Generationalism spreads difference across time while tending to eliminate it in any given
moment. That the representatives of generations happen to be middle-class is contingent of course.
Generationalism need not be the medium of gentrification. But in all cases there will be the
tendency to homogenise reality by generalising the experiences of some over others (cf. Kriegel
1978, p.29). Significant power issues arise: an important question becomes who gets to name the
See Willetts 2010 p.77 for assumptions of property-ownership: ‘The boomers increasingly came to think of their house
as not just a place to live but their own personal gold mine which could pay for holidays or cars, or be their pension.’
29
27
generation and define its principal characteristics. The generational idea invites claims to have
identified the face or voice of a generation,30 partly because the family metaphor implies that
generations can be distilled to a small number of individuals. This cannot but undermine recognition
of plurality. It is likely to provoke resistance from those who reject being bracketed with the
dominant group image, or who feel it creates an artificial distance between themselves and those of
other generations. And as it leads to the marginalisation of certain experiences, justice claims that
rest on the intergenerational view are always vulnerable to counter-claims which declare they
perform or tolerate injustices intra-generationally.
To be sure, the tendency to conceal diversity within a given group is true of any collective
concept – it is true of nation, class, gender and ethnos. Yet the generational category is a particularly
demanding one, as it seems to deny its members the possibility of exit. In most modern conceptions,
the dissident can leave the nation, the rich person can renounce her possessions31, the person
dissatisfied with conventional gender identities can explore hybrids, and the member of the ethnic
group may hope, with effort, to achieve entry into a new one. Generation, however, seems more
akin to race: individuals are stuck with their social location. They must accept it, or seek to redefine
its structure and meaning (e.g. by contesting the relevant dates), or deny the meaningfulness of the
category altogether. What they cannot do is simultaneously accept the reality of the generation
while voluntarily excluding themselves from it.32
Mannheim’s answer to the diversity problem was to develop the notion of ‘generational
units’. These were to be understood as sub-denominations which differ in make-up, character and
opinion, possibly existing in a relation of adversarialism, and ultimately bound only by their shared
problems and conflicts (Mannheim 1952, p.398). A shift from identity of attributes or consciousness
towards commonality of reference-points is generally a wise move, and allows generations to be
treated as the site of competing tendencies.33 Such a perspective still fights against the logic of the
generational idea, which requires that some experiences be considered more important or
The aforementioned ‘generational activist’ Laurie Penny is sometimes cast as such, including by herself.
The poor may be stuck with their lot however. Note also the mentioned tendency for class to have cultural overtones.
32
Of course, if generation is understood as age-group, one can hope to outgrow it. But this is quite different from
voluntary exit; besides, in the alternative meaning generations are never outgrown – they age with their members.
33
Klatch 1999 addresses intra-generational tensions in depth.
30
31
28
characteristic than others (else why use the term?), but the difficulties are smaller in scale. With
some exceptions, this is not the move made in the present texts however.34 As noted, when specific
generations are evoked these tend to be cast as global rather than particularist or domain-specific,
with the consequent expectation that regularities of attribute are widely shared.
By spreading difference across time and negating it within each slice, the generational
perspective evokes a vertical ordering of society. Its scheme suggests layers resting on top of one
another – perhaps some wider than others (if the cohort is especially large), and perhaps some
thicker than others (if a longer time-range seems appropriate), but always broadly in the same
structural arrangement. Vertical orderings, as the anthropologists remind us, tend to carry overtones
of hierarchy, for there is a widespread human tendency to associate higher worth with things in an
elevated position (Laponce 1981). Whereas a lateral ordering – e.g. the left-right political axis –
implies items of equal worth or legitimacy, a vertical one does not. Here seems to lie one of the
symbolic origins of the association between generational position and authority. It is ambiguous in
the generational scheme, of course, which generation stands above which. If the scale is calibrated
such that the oldest are above, one easily arrives at a symbolic underpinning for the idea of respect
for elders and scepticism towards the young (or their infantilisation). If alternatively one places
youth at the top, and moves into the past as one descends the axis, one can evoke the superiority of
the new over the old, of vitality over decay, innocence over decadence. The generational scheme
permits a wide variety of vertical orderings, but all seem to involve the ranking of layers. The risk is
that this necessarily accords a subordinate role to large sections of society. Generationalism seems
to entail an unequal distribution of authority, something erosive of political equality.
A second major tendency embedded in generationalism is that towards social determinism.
One sees this most clearly in the naturalistic versions. Willetts’ text is deterministic in more than
one way – his endorsement of the contribution socio-biological approaches can make to public
discourse (2010, p.101) is arguably not a necessary corollary of his generationalism – but the
tendency to treat cohort size as trumping political initiative is typical of the demographic approach.
34
See Beckett 2010, p.58, for a rare problematisation of boomer middle-classness; for discussion of intra-generational
inequalities and contradictions, see Howker and Malik 2010 p.11 and Radical Future p.23.
29
Naturalistic facts are decisive: ‘it is not that some generations are good and others bad; it is that
some are big and others are small’ (Willetts 2010, p.xvii). In a fashion surprisingly redolent of
Marxist class analysis, Willetts mixes calls to baby-boomer action with a strongly pre-determined
notion of the action they must engage in. The conception of political agency is a quite limited one:
we have the option either to do what needs to be done or to postpone the inevitable. That there is a
choice of some kind means moral arguments can still be applied (Willetts 2010, p.xxi), yet the
choice is a narrow one. The more culturalist forms of generationalism we have encountered are
undoubtedly less determinist. Beckett puts emphasis on what Atlee’s Britain managed to achieve
under conditions of post-war bankruptcy, to highlight what political will can produce (2010, p.180).
Yet although the determining impact of demographics and economics is rejected, generations are
nonetheless cast as heavily shaped by their cultural circumstances (notably their schooling), and the
imprint they receive at a critical age has long-term repercussions. Insofar as the generational idea in
its cultural form requires people display stability in their dispositions (Rintala 1963), this militates
against imputations of agency. Least deterministic are those approaches which focus neither on
demographic facts nor on dispositions but on shared experiences, and which seek to raise
consciousness of these for the sake of political mobilisation – see here Howker and Malik. Their call
for more ideals and less strategic calculation in politics can hardly be seen as determinist. Yet even
here there is a tendency to cast the young generation as victims rather than agents: it is Britain’s
leaders, not its generations, who have choices to make, and it is not clear how far the generational
language supports this agentialism. Close to absurd is the position articulated in the Boorman text:
the young are encouraged to vote in the 2010 election (ostensibly an agential perspective), but
specifically for candidates who are under 46 or over 65, since those between these ages (the
boomers) are tarnished by the values of their generation. ‘We can not stop the debt bomb,’ the blurb
states, ‘but we can remove the Boomer politicians from office’. It feels less like a statement of
agency than a desire for vengeance. The candidates voters might want to vote for are identified by
age rather than party allegiance.
30
That generationalism should have a determinist thrust to it may seem paradoxical, since it
appears to have a visible agential element too. It suggests collective protagonists striding the stage
of history, whose actions explain major trends. Yet this is typically a highly mechanistic notion of
agency in which the social is strongly prioritised over the political. It suggests political choices and
behaviour are largely a function of social facts, be these the structures which limit the options for
agency or the biographical features of individuals which narrow the horizons of their imagination.
Humans become the bearers of demographic facts or unchosen opinions imprinted by time. If there
is agency, it is in no sense a deliberative agency, one that allows choice, debate and persuasion
concerning how to exercise it.
In Wohl’s summary of the early-twentieth-century variety, ‘it
demoted the mind and called into question its autonomy by explaining ideas as the direct and
unmediated product of experience’ (1979, p.236). Of course, this is exactly where its appeal lies for
some. If social facts are all-powerful, one can use them as the basis for long-term explanatory
accounts and cultural diagnoses which soar over historical detail. Furthermore – and here is one of
the specificities of generationalism – one has heightened confidence in one’s ability to predict the
future, since much of what one needs to know about the inclinations of adults for the next few
decades seems identifiable in the past and present experiences of the living. Half-formed tendencies
can be identified early as ‘time-bombs’, and if not forestalled than at least adapted to. A world of
determinative social facts is knowable and predictable, even if this means taking a dim view of the
deliberative agency of those today and to come.
It is the promised land of technocratic
administration, and a democratic dystopia.
Ultimately one detects a tension in the generationalist ideas we have been examining.
Today’s generationalism – most clearly in the sophisticated form developed by Willetts – is an
unsteady compromise between scientific-historical thinking on the one hand and normative,
consciousness-raising thinking on the other. It attempts to represent a reality of some kind, but also
to inspire a response from its audience. Generationalism tends to be most empirically plausible, and
most consistent with political pluralism, when it avoids projecting homogeneity of action and intent
onto large numbers of people and instead attends to the diversity of impulses within timeframes.
31
This is also when it is least deterministic.
A generationalism confined to highlighting the
significance of temporal factors in units of modest size defined by shared goals, be they
organisations, movements, representative bodies or artistic schools, could make testable claims and
viable explanatory arguments – much more so than one which seeks truths at a society-wide level
and tends to lapse into caricature (Jaeger 1985, p.288). It would also do least violence to democratic
ideas. But a generationalism which seeks to raise ethical concerns, and which seeks to make the
future governable in the present, necessarily has a generalising impulse, and will always be tempted
to evoke much larger formations. This is done most consistently by stepping back from historical
time and referring to highly abstract notions such as ‘the next generation’, ‘the young’, and ‘future
generations’, as debates in the philosophy of intergenerational justice tend to, yet de-historicising the
concept of generation reduces the immediacy and accessibility of the message. Contemporary
generationalism satisfies the generalising impulse by evoking large but fairly specified generations –
images such as ‘the baby-boomers’, which are provocative yet suggest (probably dubiously) a
modicum of realism. The master-narrative they thereby produce seems a weakly democratic one,
caught between the desire to empiricise generations and the desire to think on the grand scale.
Conclusion
Generationalism – the systematic appeal to the concept of generation for social and political analysis
– has been on the rise in recent British public discourse. Contributors to this perspective find a
variety of ways to assert the centrality of generations: as historical explanations, as ways to
periodise, as sources of community; as ways to identify injustice; and as an axis of conflict and
impending crisis. Receptivity to the generational idea can be attributed to macro-social trends and
landmark events which cultivate sensitivity to change and its consequences. The particular themes
developed are best understood in the context of what generationalism offers to established political
viewpoints. The effect is a political master-narrative that promises a new way to think about
32
obligation, community and collective action, yet that poses challenges for key democratic ideas to do
with pluralism, equality and the possibility of deliberative agency.
The rise of generationalism suggests the ongoing appeal of large, organising frameworks by
which to comprehend society – ideologies, in the non-pejorative sense of the term. In a time of great
uncertainty about the future, the generational scheme offers a means of coping with that uncertainty,
perhaps even making the future knowable. In many ways it is meagre comfort, for the future is cast
in threatening terms, its generations characterised by suffering and conflict. Yet the suggestion of
continuity provides ontological security, even if nothing else.
Whether there is a constituency for the generational view beyond the circles examined is an
important secondary question.
Is generationalism creating new social artefacts?
Indeed, is it
producing generations, i.e. large numbers of people who show a willingness to identify themselves
and others as members of such? If so, with what level of agreement do they draw the family tree,
and how far do they conform to the behaviour expected of them? Or do generations remain the
fiction of public intellectuals? Insofar as the latter is true, they seem likely to be influential fictions
nonetheless, shaping how we think about the past and future, and how we act in the present.
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