This essay first examines the major conceptual approaches to the study of life course and generational politics: non-life course and non-generational politics, life-course politics, generational politics, and the interactive life course and generational politics approach. Second, the various research designs employed to study life course and generational politics are outlined, including the cross-sectional design, longitudinal design, time-series design, and the aging-cohort-period design. An evaluation of the methodological shortcomings and suitability of the research designs suggests that certain research strategies are more appropriate than others to the various conceptual approaches. The interactive life course and generational political perspective in particular provides considerable opportunity to explore the interplay between life-cycle development and history, and a fruitful methodological strategy for using this approach is to combine the life-history technique with generational analysis within a comparative framework. Illustrations from empirical investigations of life course and generational politics are provided throughout the essay.

Life Course and Generational Politics

The attempt to explain political behavior has been an important part of Western philosophy, and though a variety of interpretations have been offered over the centuries, one of the most enduring explanations has been age. The ancient Greeks were among the first to identify differences in life-cycle development, which they said had much to do with stability and change in society. Aristotle observed that political conflicts are due not only to the differences between rich and poor but to the struggle between fathers and sons (Feuer, 1969; Marias, 1970; Nash, 1978). In the nineteenth century, the French positivists, in their attempt to identify various “laws” of society, pointed to the importance of the different biological ages of life as key conditioning forces for human experience. In 1839, Comte noted that the duration of human life plays a major part in social evolution, as one generation gives way to another (Jansen, 1975). The romantic-historicists took issue with the positivists’ emphasis on “biotic” generations and stressed instead the importance of historical experiences which influence the mentality (mentalité collective) of each generation (Marias, 1968; Esler, 1982, 1984).

Ann Loades was the first woman to be honoured with a CBE (‘Commander of the British Empire’) medal for ‘services to theology’. She was the first female president of The Society for the Study of Theology. And she was the first woman in any discipline to be given a personal chair (professorship) at Durham University, UK, where she taught from 1975 to 2003. A very well-known figure in British theology, Loades is perhaps known best for her work in feminist theology. Her Feminist Theolog y: A Reader (1990) defined and galvanised the challenge of North Atlantic feminism to both churches and academy. Before that, Searching for Lost Coins (1987) was the first monograph on feminist theology to emerge from an academic in a British theology department, arising as it did from the Scott Holland Lectures. Her major monograph Feminist Theolog y: Voices from the Past (2000) is striking for its distinctive emphasis on ‘enlarged feminism’ – that is, while concerned with women's self-determination, it is no less so with their dependents. Accompanying these books are a raft of articles by Loades arising from her commitments to doing theology through feminist frames.

Over time, however, Professor Loades's work ranged over philosophical theology, theological ethics, sacramental spirituality and the figure of Mary, amongst other themes and foci. Her doctoral studies were in eighteenth-century philosophy and so, naturally, her first publications were on Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and their peers. Nineteenth-century thinkers (with Elizabeth Cady Stanton [1815–1902] and Josephine Butler [1828–1906] especially important to Loades) and then those in the twentieth-century came to prominence in her writing over time, with work on Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) and Austin Farrer (1904–1968) among her many publications. In so far as Underhill and Sayers are remembered and studied in Britain today, this may have much to do with Loades's bringing forward their contributions into view of a new generation of scholars. And of course, although neither Underhill nor Sayers were ‘feminists’, Loades has been keen to praise their efforts in their own time and place to gain a public, use their gifts and speak their minds.

Ann Loades was a gracious human being of enormous intellectual, moral and personal energy, exemplifying the Dantean ‘passionate intellect’ both described and endorsed by Dorothy Sayers. Whilst widely read in many academic and non-academic literatures, in addition to her scholarly expertise in philosophy and theology she was a great lover of novels and music and dance and theatre and opera and art and good food (often prepared skillfully by her). She was deeply rooted in the historic cultures of Great Britain but possesses a profoundly cosmopolitan sensibility that takes in Europe and North America as well. Perhaps more than anyone else, I think that Ann Loades – along with her Durham and St Andrews colleague David Brown – presented me with a vision of the Christian faith that was also integrated convincingly with what could most plausibly be called ‘the real world’ That is, as Austin Farrer put it about God's action in the created order, the shared theological vision here was not made by ‘faking the story or defying probability at any point’ but rather emerged organically from the genuine realities under consideration. For Ann, neither side of the ‘faith’/‘world’ equation overdetermines the result, but both are allowed to retain their full integrity. Some may regard this balance with suspicion as leading inevitably to a form of lukewarm or watered down ‘latitudinarianism’, but while Ann is entirely open to and indeed insists upon the rational, moral and imaginative interrogation of the Christian tradition, her general perspective remains that of a distinctly ‘Catholic’ Anglican with yet a great appreciation of ecumenical diversity and the need to learn from outside the bounds of orthodoxy.

As Stephen Burns's introduction aptly indicates, Ann was one of the first British theologians to articulate and defend an explicitly feminist perspective, and her groundbreaking work here deserves continuing attention. I would not want to saddle Ann with the now controversial and in some circles pejorative term ‘second-wave feminist’, but she was nevertheless someone keenly, indeed painfully, aware that the social concerns of that earlier phase of feminism remain unresolved and therefore it is a mistake to ‘move on’ to other perhaps equally valid and pressing issues without continuing to draw urgent attention to these earlier ones as well. She was, for example, closely attuned to the material conditions of human life and especially their tragic deprivation in certain sectors.

List of Utopian Newspapers and Journals in Esbozo

The Life of Max Nettlau

The general view is that Max Nettlau was a vital historian of anarchism, but little is known of his life. “Obscure” might be the fairest term. That is, however, an unfair judgment. While it is true that he is not much heralded, there are more than a score of sources which provide for an adequate understanding of Nettlau's life, enough to provide quite a detailed chronology.

An Annotated Gazetteer of Nettlau’s Utopians

Serious utopian thinking about a better society was only revived eighteen centuries after Plato by Thomas More (1478–1535) with his Utopia (1516).

An awareness of a lack of social justice was not missing during the long span of the Middle Ages. The idea of natural right (i.e., a theoretical utopia of abstract forces) and even the notion of a golden age were acknowledged, albeit only in a Platonic sense, by hard-hearted jurists and by Church fathers greedy for temporal as much as spiritual dominion. This natural right established the existence of an aboriginal equality and liberty; it recognized neither the exclusive right of the few to wealth nor the exploitation of the rest. The law and the Church have always provided themselves with loopholes by means of which they could deny that they were defending their positions of power. This strategy did not prevent them from being fierce apologists for every part of the power structure or from taking advantage of that structure in order to threaten natural rights and social Christianity when the people showed themselves to be fed up with being dominated and exploited. In this way, the two (the law and the Church) have acquired absolute political and administrative power and, as far as the Church is concerned, enormous wealth. And at the same time, the ideal utopian element in their theories has appealed to men of great intelligence and heart. Thomas More is the perfect example of a man of this sort, one who understands the idea of natural right and the social criticism directed at the church, and one who understands the Renaissance, Platonic humanism, Plato's Politeia, and the best that the Romans and Greeks produced. More is such an expert in justice as well as commerce that, in this age of great discoveries, he conceives vast plans, and sees unknown worlds brought nearer to discovery by every journey. He also sees the suffering of the poor and the machinery of government that crushes them. He says clearly, and these words always have worth, that all modern states seem to be nothing more than a conspiracy of the rich who, under the pretext of a common salvation, look after nothing more than their own fortunes; they pass regulations in the name of all, and therefore in the name of the poor also, and call them laws.

Austin Marsden Farrer (1904–1968) grew to maturity in a Europe in upheaval. He was an adolescent during World War I and shared the experience of privation in Britain. He was a young adult throughout the period of the General Strike in the United Kingdom and the economic slump that followed it, observing at a distance the rise of National Socialism and Fascism in a Europe that had also witnessed the Russian Revolution and the advent of Communist governments. World War II was associated not just with the aerial and saturation bombing of cities of civilians, but also with the unimaginable horrors of systematic mass murder, and not only in Europe. Although we associate Farrer with the Oxford in which he spent most of his working life, we need to keep this larger framework in mind if we are to appreciate him, the context that nourished him and his world of friends of various degrees of intimacy that we are going to bring into focus in this chapter. We begin with Farrer himself, broaden out to look at his circle of friends and acquaintances, and return to him in the last part. I want to pay particular attention to three key women thinkers of this period, because their influence is often underestimated.

Education

Austin was born the middle of three children into a lively, learned Nonconformist family, to whom he paid a profound tribute: ‘From first infancy our elders loved us, played us, served us, talked us into knowing them; and so the believer claims that he has been brought by mediated divine initiatives into the knowledge of God’. At St Paul's School in London, he received a predominantly literary and classical education, which included the invaluable practice of learning by heart both poetry and prose. He had no pretensions himself to be a poet of much significance, though write it he certainly could. He was also able to translate texts from the Western Church's inheritance of Latin liturgy and devotion.

Farrer's literary gift was to be displayed in an inimitable prose style, especially that intended for oral delivery, as in his sermons, and his sensitivity to metaphor and imagery was to flower especially when he dealt with the biblical text. It takes someone thoroughly familiar with poetry in many styles and several languages to engage with the wealth of genres to be found in scripture.

The purposes of this study are to assess the extent of youth movement activity in Western and Eastern Europe in the 1980s, and to interpret the youth movements from a political generational perspective. Based on information from news sources, books, and journals published between 1980–1990, the major European youth movements are listed by year of occurrence and country of origin. The findings of this study indicate that much of the youth movement activity in Western Europe took place during the early-to-mid 1980s, involving youth protests against environmental destruction, militarism, NATO, and the presence of U.S. nuclear missiles on European soil. In Eastern Europe youth movements peaked in the late 1980s over the issues of freedom, democracy, glasnost, and independence from Soviet Russian domination. University reform protests and the counterculture movements occurred in both Western and Eastern Europe throughout the 1980s. From a political generational perspective, the extensive youth movement activity, issues of protest, and existence of various life-course, cohort, and period effects within European youth movements suggest there were two extraordinary political generations in the 1980s—an earlier one in Western Europe and a later one in Eastern Europe.

Youth Movements

As far back as antiquity, young people have rebelled against their elders and acted out against society. Much of this rambunctious youthful activity represented brief episodes of collective behavior, and it was not until the early nineteenth century that full-fledged youth movements came into being, characterized by the organized efforts of young people to bring about political reform or revolution. At the root of youth movements is a shared perception by a critical mass of young people that traditional institutions, the political regime, and the implementation of a society's social and economic values are no longer legitimate or effective. As a result, youth take it upon themselves to protest against existing societal conditions and to change the political order.

The first youth movement (the Burschenschaft) occurred in 1815 at the University of Jena in the central German state of Weimar, followed by other youth movements throughout Europe, which, like the Burschenschaften, rejected absolutism in favor of the modern nation-state.

This study explores the relationship between youth movements and citizenship that developed and changed over the past 200 years. The principal historical and contemporary perspectives on citizenship are summarized, noting that youth movements—which first began in 1815—have occurred in waves during certain periods in modern history. These waves or clusters of youth movement activity are called historical generations, representing combinations of generational and historical forces. The characteristics of historical generations are outlined, and five extraordinary periods of youth movement activity are identified and described: Young Europe, Post-Victorian, Great Depression, 1960s Generation, and 1980s Generation. Focus is given to the types of citizenship around which young people mobilized within each of the five historical generations. Finding that the struggle for citizenship has been a central feature of youth movements, some of the common patterns and newly emerging themes in the evolving relationship between the individual and the nation-state are discussed. The study concludes with a brief summary of the findings.

INTRODUCTION

One of the characteristics of the 1980s was the eruption of political protest and widespread youth movement activity throughout every region of the world. Youth movements are the organized efforts of young people to mobilize for political change, and in the 1980s young people formed political movements in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central and Latin America, North America, Africa and the Middle East, and Asia (Braungart and Braungart 1990c). In Western Europe, young people rallied around slogans such as “Stop de N-bom,” “Chase the Yankees out and shatter NATO,” and they demanded “free space” or autonomous youth centers. In Eastern Europe, the rallying cries were “Democracy now or never,” “Freedom and peace,” and “Away with the army,” while Chinese youth chanted “Down with dictatorship” and “Give me liberty or give me death!” Whether peaceful and earnest or bloody and murderous, the 1980s youth movements signalled young people's anger, dissatisfaction, and rejection of the status quo along with their personal determination to make a difference in society by bringing about needed reform.

To much of the world's adult population, the 1980s youth unrest was reminiscent of another era of youthful protest that took place in the 1960s.