ABSTRACT
Generational analysis begins from the proposition that individuals from the same generational cohort share certain cultural views and dispositions on account of their belonging to that generation. Thinking about politics in generational terms has a number of strengths, but equally prominent weaknesses. In Klotz's more mature view, then, it is about status and articulation that makes a perspective testable, not the incommensurability of perspectives that they offer via the mind-world philosophical assumptions they make. The need for a notion of "practice" and "practical reasoning" was clearly required. But what this also makes clear is that Pouliot's "logic of practice", while an improvement on the rational actor model, plays down the conscious element of social life and its role in social struggle. This chapter has been long on criticism - of second-generation Constructivism especially - and big on the meta-theoretical reflection.
