Description
Almost one hundred years ago, the sociologist Karl Mannheim sought to make sense of ‘The Problem of Generations’ in a way that embraced the very diffi culties involved in the study of this phenomenon. The sociological signifi cance of generations, contended Mannheim, could not be comprehended through a focus either on their quantitative existence or their qualitative experience: the sociology of generations is neither a question of numbers nor the introspective study of everyday life. What matters is the interaction between ‘new participants in the cultural process’ (Mannheim 1952 , p. 292) and the society in which these participants are born, develop, and transform their world. In this respect, the problem of generations is the problem of knowledge: how we, as a society, ensure that the world lives on through those whom we leave behind.
Mannheim’s was not the first or only attempt to theorise generations from a sociological perspective. Indeed, the first part of his essay grapples with the ideas put forward by other thinkers, from both the positivist and the romantic-historical traditions, and draws from these approaches the elements synthesised in his own formulation of the problem. Since Mannheim, there have been other important developments in the study of generations and the sociology of knowledge. These later approaches, briefy considered below, both extend and challenge Mannheim’s approach, attempting to fi nd ways of studying empirically the experience of generations, and accounting for social and cultural changes that affect the way that the problem of generations is framed and understood.
There is no scope, in this short book, to do justice to the wealth of literature that has contributed to the field over the past century, and what follows is not an attempt to synthesise all these developments. Rather, the aim is to draw out some specifi cally new directions and challenges that arise when we examine the problem of generations in the context of Anglo-American societies today. Generations are defi ned, here, neither in the narrow cohort sense (a group of people born around the same time) nor by the more individualised life course approach, but, following Mannheim, as historical, or social, generations, whose self-defi nition is forged by the circumstances in which they come as age. As such, we see the problem of generations as a problem of knowledge how society’s accumulated cultural heritage is transmitted from generation to generation at a time when the status both of knowledge itself, and those charged with passing it on, stands in question.