This historical analysis book proposes that anglo-american history moves in cycles of approximately 80 to 100years. The book was written/published in 1997 and contained some interesting prophecies about the coming decades.
The authors propose that this cycle period (80 to 100yrs) is intuitively based on the lifetime of a human. Furthermore, they suggest that these cycles are broken into 4 "turnings". The authors present their thesis against the historical record of anglo-american history starting with Late Medieval (1435-1487) and follows through to today.
These four "turnings" include
1) a golden age, a high time
2) a social upheaval, a spiritual/religious/social awakening
3) a social dispersion, an unraveling
4) a crisis, a society shaking war
The book focuses strongly on an American historical perspective; when Britain and America part ways, the story focuses exclusively on America. The turnings are explained as based on the timing of generational changes, approximately every 20 to 25yrs. Therefore, based on the theory of generational turnings and the historical record, the authors make interesting prophecies of the coming 4th Turning (hence the title, again published in 1997).
The authors describe the latest cycle in detail. WW2 ended the last cycle leading to the high time of the 50's and 60's. Which transitioned to a social upheaval period and eventually to a period of unraveling. The authors predicted a crisis mood beginning around 2005 and ending around 2025. If this crisis/cycle ends well for America, they expect another period of golden age/high time.
I recommend reading this book for all the above interesting analysis and well placed predictions provided by the authors. I criticize it for being repetitive and only shallowly explaining large important portions of history, especially pre-civil war history. It also lacks any analysis of other nations potential cycles and how out of sync cultures interact, this would be well suited for follow up books. Based on how well their predictions have panned out so far, we have an interesting 15yrs ahead of us.
If anyone has historical and thesis criticisms of the book, I would like to hear it.
