The Modern Cultural Intelligentsia as a Generational Movement: Viewpoints on the Uses of a Societal Generation in History based on Finnish Intellectual History

This essay discusses the ideas of a societal generation through five
Finnish generational movements of the intellectuals. The essay shows that although
the ideas of societal generation can be a fruitful way to approach cultural-historical
phenomena, it has its problems. The main difficulty in applying the theory stems
from the fact that since the concept of a societal generation is modern, it can be
problematic to apply it to the generations before the 1920s as well as to late-modern
generations. Another challenge in using the theory lies in the fact that becoming a
generational movement presupposes the self-consciousness of coevals as belonging
to a generation in order to become one.