1970/01/01 by Arthur Marwick
Social Sciences · #Youth Education and Societal Dynamics #Irish and British Studies #Political and Economic history of UK and US
paper · doi:10.1177/002200947000500103
However we may define 'youth', it is clear that as a political and cultural phenomenon it makes its first significant appearance on the British scene in the I92os: 'youth' magazines before 1914 were magazines for children. The ambiguous usage, of course, continues throughout the period under review, but since my concern is with youth as agent not as object, with youth as, for example, 'an expression of progressive university thought', not as 'the disinherited generation' (that is, the children of the depressed areas), youth in this article will be taken as meaning 'young adult'.1 Only the social and economic changes which accompanied the second world war and which were finally worked out in the early sixties, gave 'youth' of a younger and different character an important positive role in society. But that does not solve all our problems of definition: the term is elastic at the top as well as at the bottom. In our civilization politicians are permitted to perpetrate their follies at an age when the rest of us have long since been put out to grass; youthfulness in politics consequently stretches high up the age scale. Historians meet similar problems when attempting to generalize about social class or political ideology; I shall call upon similar remedies, the principles of polarization and identification. Youth will be taken as having its pole somewhere in the twenties, the years of young adulthood: but it will be relevant to consider those politicians, poets, publicists, ten or twenty years older, who seek positively to make their appeal to young adults, and with whom young adults are prepared to identify. Precocious adolescents, with definite articulated views on politics and society, naturally, are also included.