The Fourth Turning (Strauss and Howe)

Strauss and Howe’s generational theory of history: Anglo-American history moves in roughly 80-to-100-year cycles (“saecula”), each divided into four ~20-year “turnings” — High, Awakening, Unravelling and Crisis — driven by the predictable way each generation reacts to the one that raised it. The fourth turning is the crisis phase, and the 1996 book forecast one arriving in the United States in the mid-2020s. The framework has been widely criticised as unfalsifiable and widely adopted anyway, which is most of what makes it interesting.

Why it’s on the list: The canonical statement of cyclical generational history — worth reading as the load-bearing source behind an enormous amount of contemporary “we are living through a crisis era” argument, whatever one concludes about its predictive claims.

Where I saw it: @FilArons’s recommended-reading list, November 16, 2025.

Connections

• Historical Futurism — the portfolio idea this sits inside: reading the past as a way of forecasting.
• History · Forecasting — the two things the book tries to weld together, and the reason it is contested.
• The Fourth Turning — the concept page tracking where the framework gets invoked across the corpus.