Youth and Arab politics: The political generation of 1935–36

Sociologists and historians such as Karl Mannheim and Jose Ortega Y Gasset have analyzed the role of ‘political generations’ or ‘historical generations’ in Western societies, departing from biological interpretations and explaining generational tensions in terms of conceptualization of knowledge. A generation is also a cultural construct, evolving in relation to real or an assumed shared social experience and hence responding to certain collective needs. New historical generations they say, are the product of common formative experiences stemming from major events and rapid changes. While members of the old guard cope with such changes with means derived from an already crystallized reservoir of fundamental ideas, the young are conceptually shaped by them. Only rapid, drastic transformations within a defined community and a shared environment can bring about the emergence of a new historical generation. ‘Integrative attitudes’ and ‘formative tendencies’ shape the minds of a generation whose members share the same basic concepts and a similar sense of affiliation to the same community, but not necessarily the same views and opinions. ¹ When the issue of generations was addressed in the 1960s, primarily by American sociologists, the term ‘cohort’ was sometimes preferred. Norman Ryder defined a cohort as ‘as an aggregate of individual elements, each of which experienced a significant event in its life history during the same chronological interval.’ He argued that ‘successive cohorts are differentiated by changing content of formal education, by peer-group socialization and by idiosyncratic historical experience. Young adults are prominent in war, revolution, immigration, urbanization and technological change’ ²