The Fourth Turning Is Here
What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End
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The visionary behind the bestselling phenomenon The Fourth Turning looks once again to America’s past to predict our future in this “riveting and revelatory” (Tony Robbins) prophecy for how our present era of unrest will resolve over the next ten years—and what our lives will look like afterward.
Thirty years ago, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss dazzled the world with a provocative new theory of American history. Looking back at the last 500 years, they’d uncovered a distinct pattern: modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting roughly eighty to one hundred years, the length of a long human life, with each cycle composed of four eras—or “turnings”—that always arrive in the same order and each last about twenty years. The last of these eras—the fourth turning—was always the most perilous, a period of civic upheaval and national mobilization as traumatic and transformative as the New Deal and World War II, the Civil War, or the American Revolution.
Now, right on schedule, our own fourth turning has arrived…and Neil Howe has returned with an extraordinary new prediction. What we see all around us—the polarization, the growing threat of civil conflict and global war—will culminate by the early 2030s in a climax that poses great danger and yet also holds great promise, perhaps even bringing on America’s next golden age. Every generation alive today will play a vital role in determining how this crisis is resolved, for good or ill.
“Big history and bold futurology” (The Wall Street Journal), The Fourth Turning Is Here takes us deep into the collective personality of each living generation to make sense of our current crisis. explore how all of us will be differently affected by the political, social, and economic challenges we’ll face in the decade to come, and reveal how our country, our communities, and our families can best prepare to meet these challenges ahead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Howe (The Fourth Turning, with Strauss) revisits in this far-ranging treatise his concept of historical cycles, which he calls saecula, composed of four generation-long "Turnings." Since WWII, Howe contends, humans have passed through the "High," "Awakening," and "Unraveling" turnings and are currently in the fourth, the "Crisis" turning, which should climax by the early 2030s. The vaguely sketched period could see economic crashes, political chaos, or war, but it will likely leave humanity, Howe argues, with reinvigorated national institutions, social solidarity, prosperity, and technological marvels. Howe grounds all this in an intricate system of generational archetypes stretching back to the 15th century. Thus, the baby boomers are a prophet generation that will offer visionary leadership in the crisis, Generation X a nomad generation that will seek to provide pragmatic management and stability after suffering childhood abandonment, millennials a public-spirited hero generation that will build the new order, and Generation Z an overly sensitive artist generation. Howe's writing sometimes feels nebulous and Nostradamian—"As Artists replace the Heroes in childhood, they are overprotected at a time of traumatic conflict and adult self-sacrifice"—and his historical comparisons aren't always well supported. The result is an intriguing but ultimately unconvincing theory of history's convoluted patterns.
