Inclusive and Differentiated Citizenship

Abstract

Karl Mannheim in the 1920s argued that generations are formed when members of a particular age cohort go through the same historical events and experiences that are significant and shared among the group. Through having the same or similar shared experience, generations develop a world view or consciousness. Mannheim believed that young people develop a ‘fresh contact’ onto the world, which develops over time into something that is recognisable and identifiable to themselves and to outsiders as a generational world view. Each generation will share a historically positioned outlook, a similar socialisation and a comparable identity formation. In ways similar to Marx’s analysis on the development of social class identity, generations share life-chances and also positional interests. As Mannheim puts it:

The fact of belonging to the same class, and that of belonging to the same generation or age group, have this in common, that both endow the individuals sharing in them with a common location in the social and historical process, and thereby limit them to a specific range of potential experience.

(Mannheim, 1952, p. 291)

Mannheim here looks at generation as a specific social group. In everyday life and in social sciences we talk of childhood and adulthood as two categories, or ‘stages’. Jens Qvortrup (1987) went further and argued that ‘children’ and ‘adults’ were not some descriptive shorthand but structural elements attached to a particular social status. The different categories had shared interests within themselves and between other groups, notably adults.