Generational cycles are the pattern where group solidarity is transmitted and eroded across approximately three generations, each phase producing distinct social and political conditions.
In Ibn Khaldun’s analysis, a dynasty or civilisation passes through three generational phases. The founding generation possesses the solidarity forged through hardship. The second generation, raised in the founder’s success but still close to its origins, maintains sufficient cohesion. The third generation, raised in comfort without memory of hardship, has lost the solidarity that enabled the civilisation’s rise. The cycle then resets as a new group from the periphery, still forged in solidarity, overthrows the weakened centre.
The cycle runs approximately 120 years, or three generations. This is not a moral claim about individual character but a structural observation about the conditions that produce and dissolve collective cohesion. Each generation inherits the conditions created by the one before it: the first inherits hardship, the second inherits success, the third inherits comfort.
The concept applies beyond political dynasties to any group that achieves power through collective cohesion: empires, corporations, political movements, and social institutions. The pattern is structural, not cultural: the mechanism is the same regardless of the group’s identity, beliefs, or stated values.