What is The Fourth Turning about?

The Fourth Turning is William Strauss and Neil Howe's 1997 argument that Anglo-American history moves in recurring eighty-to-one-hundred-year cycles, each composed of four "turnings" corresponding to distinct social moods. The First Turning is a High — a period of institutional confidence and expanding order. The Second is an Awakening — a spiritual and cultural upheaval that challenges the prevailing order. The Third is an Unraveling — a time of individualism, institutional distrust, and cultural fragmentation. The Fourth is a Crisis — a period of severe collective danger that destroys the old order and regenerates social cohesion. Strauss and Howe argued in 1997 that the United States was entering a Fourth Turning that would peak sometime around 2020 to 2030.

The book's central claim is that these cycles are driven by generational biology. Each turning lasts roughly twenty years — the length of a generation — and each generation is shaped by the turning during which its formative years fall. This creates a repeating four-type pattern: Prophets (born during a High), Nomads (born during an Awakening), Heroes (born during an Unraveling), and Artists (born during a Crisis). The Baby Boomers are Prophets; Generation X are Nomads; Millennials are Heroes. Each archetype carries characteristic values, behaviors, and social roles that, the authors argue, recur across cycles.

Strauss and Howe trace this pattern through major Anglo-American historical cycles: the crisis of the colonial era culminating in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War era crisis, and the Depression and World War II crisis. Each followed the same four-phase structure, and each Fourth Turning featured a defining external catalyst, a "regeneracy" of civic unity, and a climax that destroyed the old order and created conditions for a new High.

The theory is ambitious and the pattern-fitting is impressive, but it has clear limits. History is messier than a model of neat twenty-year phases, and the authors must do some squeezing to make centuries of events fit. The framework also has difficulty accounting for non-Anglo societies and applies most cleanly to periods of genuine military crisis. But as a lens for understanding generational dynamics and long-wave social change, it remains genuinely provocative and has accumulated a large readership decades after publication — in part because events since 1997 have done little to disprove the core prediction.