ABSTRACT
The history of the modern concept of generation dates back to revolutionary France. The idea of a generation as forming part of a society's unbroken continuation over time, with its roots in the Bible and classical literature, is counterposed by the idea of a generation as marking a caesura, as an autonomous, independent moment in the making of the world. One might say that restoring sovereignty to the generation as well as to the individual was then held to be a duty. For Dromel, every political generation dialectically bases the distinctive features of its superior political ideal on the acts carried out by the preceding generation. The rise of memorial history has provided the category of generation with a new field in which to operate. The category 'generation' became significant 'only because the importance of the traditional criteria of social classification diminished and traditional social identities proved inadequate'.
