Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376

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Journal of Aging Studies

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The fourth age and the concept of a ‘social imaginary’: A

theoretical excursus
Chris Gilleard ⁎, Paul Higgs
Mental Health Sciences Unit, Faculty of Brain Sciences, University College London, Charles Bell House, 67–73 Riding House Street, London W1W 7EY, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper explores the idea of the ‘fourth age’ as a form of social imaginary. During the latter
Received 7 June 2013 half of the twentieth century and beyond, the cultural framing of old age and its modern
Received in revised form 12 August 2013 institutionalisation within society began to lose some of its former chronological coherence.
Accepted 30 August 2013 The ‘pre-modern’ distinction made between the status of ‘the elder’ and the state of ‘senility’
has re-emerged in the ‘late modern’ distinction between the ‘third’ and the ‘fourth’ age. The
Keywords: centuries-old distaste for and fear of old age as ‘senility’ has been compounded by the growing
Castoriadis medicalization of later life, the emergence and expansion of competing narratives associated
Cultural studies with the third age, and the progressive ‘densification’ of the disabilities within the older
Fourth age
institutionalised population. The result can be seen as the emergence of a ‘late modern’ social
Third age
imaginary deemed as the fourth age. This paper outlines the theoretical evolution of the
Social imaginary
concept of a social imaginary and demonstrates its relevance to aging studies and its
applicability to the fourth age.
© 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction reflect their diminished status. Approaching old age through

The distinction between a third and a fourth age was
made salient in social gerontology by Peter Laslett, in his
book, A Fresh Map of Life (Laslett, 1989). It has been linked to
the earlier distinction made by Bernice Neugarten between
the ‘young–old’ and the ‘old–old’ (Neugarten, 1974). While
such distinctions can help make sense of the changing nature
of later life in contemporary society, these terms have
limitations if viewed primarily in chronological or demo-
graphic terms (Baltes & Smith, 2003: 124-5). Rather than
treating the third age and the fourth age as equivalent terms
representing chronologically bound, successive stages in the
modern adult life course, it is possible to understand these
terms as representing different paradigms for the understand-
ing of later life. Other approaches have sought to interpret old
age through concepts such as ‘disengagement’ (Cumming &
Henry, 1961) or ‘structured dependency’ (Townsend, 1981)
in order to frame the experiences of older people in ways that
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: CGilleard@aol.com (C. Gilleard).
the prism of the third and fourth ages shifts this focus. For
Gilleard and Higgs the third age is a generationally defined
‘cultural field’ which emphasises the values of choice,
autonomy, self expression and pleasure (Gilleard & Higgs,
2009). These features are captured in the later lifestyles of
older people where the combination of consumerism,
cultural engagement, the pursuit of leisure and an engage-
ment with the technologies of self-care has carved out a
distinctly different set of coordinates for later life than those
envisaged by earlier commentators. While often seen as
complementary to the concept of the third age, the fourth
age, however, is not an alternative cultural field. While the
term has become widely used (Grenier, 2012), from Gilleard
and Higgs' perspective, the fourth age can be better
understood as representative of a feared ‘state of becoming’,
an ascribed community of otherness, set apart from the
everyday experiences and practices of later life (Gilleard &
Higgs, 2010; Hazan, 2002). Its epigenetic ‘otherness’ is
reflected through its representation within third person
narratives by themes of abjection, frailty and marginalization
(Gilleard & Higgs, 2011a). While such a distinction between

0890-4065/$ – see front matter © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2013.08.004
 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
the ways that these two paradigms operate might appear to
be primarily of scholarly interest, we would counter that
making such a theoretical distinction is needed to better
understand the complexities of and fractures within contem-
porary later life and its disparate representations. To make
the difference between the third age and the fourth age
clearer it is possible to posit that while the former can be
understood as constituting a cultural field which can be
studied in relation to the everyday practices of older people,
the latter constitutes not so much a set of practices but a
‘social imaginary’ which operates as a set of often unstated
but powerful assumptions concerning the dependencies and
indignities of ‘real’ old age. While much has been written
about the cultural practices of the third age (Gilleard & Higgs,
2009, 2013) much less has been written about the fourth age
and its representation as a social imaginary of old age. In
what follows we intend to describe how the term ‘social
imaginary’ has come to prominence in contemporary social
thought and how using it in the field of aging studies can help
deepen our understanding of the contemporary fractures in
later life.
Social imaginaries: origins
Sociologists of very many different hues have long been
interested in the processes by which societies understand
themselves and how this affects social institutions and social
interactions. While the debates on this subject are profuse
and detailed it is also the case that certain concepts seem
more useful than others in carrying out particular tasks. To
this end in trying to fully understand the nature of the fourth
age, Gilleard and Higgs (2010) were drawn to the idea of the
social imaginary because it seemed to offer a richer set of
ideas than other approaches that operated on the same
terrain, such as ideology or discourse. To appreciate why it
may be fruitful to consider the fourth age as a social
imaginary it is necessary to examine the origins and
development of this particular concept.
The term ‘social imaginary’ originated with the French
theorist Cornelius Castoriadis in his book, The Imaginary
Institution of Society (Castoriadis, 1987). In this book, he
argues that all social institutions possess a central imaginary,
situated ‘on the level of elementary symbols or of global
meaning’ that links the functions of social institutions with
their symbolic forms. ‘[E]very society’, he writes, ‘posits a
“view of itself” which is at the same time a “view of the
world” … [which]… is part of its truth or its reflected
reality…without being reducible to it’ (Castoriadis, 1987:
39). As social institutions are necessarily human inventions,
their particular functions are inevitably invested with
symbolic meaning that makes sense of their functioning
within the broader structures of society. Taking a structuralist
position he contends that social institutions can only be
understood through the organisation or network of signifiers
and signified that is held within the social imaginary.
Seeking to articulate the role of the individual in the
creation, maintenance and change of social institutions,
Castoriadis sought to express the human ‘invention’ of these
symbolic inter-relationships, reflecting “the basic irreducibil-
ity of the social, the fact that what the social is and the way in
which it is, has no analogue anywhere else” (Castoriadis,
369
1987: 182). Society is, in this sense, an invented system of
social institutions that are never fixed but are always open to
new configurations. Their socio-historical specificity only
comes into existence because of the underlying ‘radical
imagination’ which human beings as human beings possess
(Castoriadis, 1987: 281). The social imaginary is thus a
necessary product of psychic life.
At the same time Castoriadis eschews any idea of a
‘fundamentalist’ nature of human beings that pre-determines
the institutions of society. While he does not deny a
relationship between what he calls ‘the natural stratum’ of
the psyche and the institutions of society, his point is that
‘nature’ serves neither as cause nor symbol of society's
organisation but is itself caught up with, and transformed by,
the existence of the social imagination (Castoriadis, 1987:
354). He extends this argument by pointing out that:
“The institution of society is as it is to the extent that it
‘materialises’ a magma of social imaginary significations
in reference to which individual and objects alone can be
grasped and even simply exist [and which is] through the
actuality of the individuals, acts and objects that they
‘inform’” (Castoriadis, 1987:356).
As has been pointed out, Castoriadis' ideas about social
imaginaries reflect a theme or trope that operates throughout
the sociological tradition, the search for an organising
principle around which societies are structured — how they
exist as well as the various and changing forms in which they
exist. This search for the social level of society, one that is
neither reducible to individual action nor that merely
expresses the sum of social institutions is evident in the
earliest sociological thinking. Thus the idea of the social
imaginary has many similarities with Durkheim's concept of
the conscious collective which represented the shared ideas
and beliefs of a society (Durkheim, 1964). For Durkheim the
conscious collective being fundamentally social in nature was
neither reducible to nor derived from individual conscious-
ness (Fournier, 2013:303; Jones, 1986: 17). Despite the
apparent simplicity of this formulation, there is debate
about what Durkheim meant by this formulation. Sometimes
he seems to be referring to common beliefs and sentiments,
while at other moments he is alluding to common rules.
Significantly, the term was abandoned in his later work in
favour of the more culturally oriented ‘collective représenta-
tions’ (Jones, 1986: 17; K. Thompson, 1982: 61). He described
collective representations as “the way in which the group
conceives of itself in its relationships with the objects which
affect it”, in short as the way society conceived or imagined
itself (Durkheim, 1982: 40). As is well known, his desire to
lay the foundations of the new science of sociology meant
that the form taken by collective representations could be
derived only from an analysis of the society in which they
arose, and not from the workings of individual minds
(Durkheim, 1982: 42).
Durkheim's conceptualisation in turn shares similarities with
the classical Marxist notion of ‘ideology’ in its concern to describe
the representation of society (Pearce, 1989; Strawbridge, 1982).
Despite “the varying and not entirely compatible ways in which
Marx… used the concept of ideology” (Barrett, 1991: 157),
Marx's approach has been widely used as a framework for
370 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
understanding the dominant ways that a society has represented
and understood itself in ways which reproduce unequal class
relations (Eagleton, 1991). Drawing on this tradition, Castoriadis'
erstwhile colleague and collaborator, Claud Lefort, saw
ideology as a specific product of modern capitalist society,
uniquely “implicated in the social divisions it serves to
dissimulate” — namely those of the capitalist mode of
production (J.B. Thompson, 1982; K. Thompson, 1982: 672).
For Lefort, ideology represented “the ways in which meaning
or signification serves to sustain relations of domination”
(Thompson, 1990: 4), whether they are based on social class
as Marx thought or whether they reflect other sources of
power and influence within society, such as those of gender,
race and/or sexuality. However, while conventional accounts
of ideology were framed in terms of discourses, narratives or
accounts that were determined by the structures of power in
society, for Castoriadis, it was the ‘radical imaginary’ that
provided the constant, trans-historical source for the devel-
opment of particular social imaginaries. For him, the radical
imaginary was not located within any system of domination,
nor was it reducible to any particular discourse of dissimula-
tion. Rather it served as the necessary means of containing
and representing the social through systems of personal
meaning which are central to the existence of the social. In
short, unlike many of the negative features of ideology which
‘mask’ an underlying set of unequal social relationships, the
social imaginary refers to the necessary as well as the
dissimilatory, and the transient as well as the permanent
network of meanings that make a society a society.
Social imaginaries: recent developments
The impact of Castoriadis on the work of contemporary
cultural theorists has been profound as thinkers have sought
ways of breaking free from Marxist theory or from varieties of
post-structuralism. The idea that society can be represented as
a social imaginary has been explored most recently by the
celebrated theorist Charles Taylor in his book Modern Social
Imaginaries (Taylor, 2004). For Taylor, the social imaginary
refers less to the outcomes of the radical imagination and more
to “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit
together with others how things go on between them and their
fellows…and the deeper normative notions and images that
underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2004: 23). Though linked
to Castoriadis' more general formulation of society as a ‘magma
of magmas’, Taylor's notion of ‘a common understanding’
amongst members of a society once again echoes Durkheim's
notion of ‘collective representations’ compounded with Bene-
dict Anderson's argument of how the modern nation state
emerged as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson, 1981).
Taylor's modern social imaginary can also be linked to
concepts of ‘social trust’ or ‘social capital’, those social cognitions
that are deemed necessary for a society to hold together
(cf. Fukuyama, 1995; Misztal, 1996). Gaonkar has summarised
the various components of Taylor's social imaginary into five
key ideas — [i] “that social imaginaries are ways of understand-
ing the social that become social entities themselves”, [ii]“that
modernity in its multiple forms relies on a special form of social
imaginary that is based on relations among strangers”,[iii] “that
the national people are a paradigmatic case of the modern social
imaginary”, [iv], “that other social imaginaries exist alongside
and compete with these national social imaginaries”, and [v],
“that the agency of social imaginaries comes into being in a
number of secular temporalities rather than existing eternally in
cosmos or higher time” (Gaonkar, 2002: 4–5).
In other recent formulations of the social imaginary
influenced by Castoriadis the role of the stranger is concep-
tually foregrounded. For Warner (2002), a significant shift
has taken place in the way strangers are now addressed and
included within the public sphere. No longer are they
considered alien or exotic; instead strangers have become
“a normal feature of the social [such that] ‘the modern social
imaginary does not make sense without strangers’” (Warner,
2002: 57). This transformation of the stranger from being
someone excluded to being someone included, Warner
argues, arose from the development of an anonymous
‘reading public’ created in large part by the development of
print journalism. By treating print media as a means of
including strangers as fellow readers it became possible for
both authors and readers to imagine themselves ‘in relation’
with each other and hence a necessary part of the social
imaginary of publics (Warner, 2002: 83).
Strangers – and by implication ‘others’ – can also be
represented discursively as social entities without having to
be particularised. Modern social imaginaries are thus no longer
shaped by a simple binary idea of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’ since
‘them’ can be treated/known/represented by a more general
‘we’ existing in a common imagined public sphere. While
Warner does not create a new meaning for the social imaginary,
he does give a socio-historical context for its transformation
into a form that renders the unfamiliar, familiar, by establishing
a common understanding amongst the reading [and listening
and viewing] public that re-constitutes, through the media, the
forms of the social imaginary.
In developing this position, Warner utilises the German
philosopher Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere (Habermas, 1962/1991). In this work
Habermas sees the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere
during the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as
allowing private individuals to speak on public matters and this
formed the basis for an articulation of public opinion. So
constituted ‘public opinion’ soon became “the most reliable
means for attaining valid and comparable statements about the
extent of democratic integration” (Habermas, 1962/1991:
244). As the means of gathering and re-circulating the
accumulated opinions of sections of the public increased, so
the sphere of public opinion became subject to manipulation
and social control through “fashions” whose shifting rules
required only a temporary loyalty. However Habermas is also
critical about the way that this process has developed and
instead of ‘public opinion’ representing a social imaginary that
could be identified with Castoriadis' idea of a radical imagina-
tion it has become ‘merged with’, ‘joined in’ or ‘colonised’ by
what he sees as the ‘system world’. Opinions become fashions
that change with the moment. Unlike Castoriadis' radical
imaginaries, the social imaginary of strangers now keeps little
faith with its psychic roots; becoming more like flotsam than
magma on a sea of mass produced social imaginaries that,
having limited roots, rise and fade like fashions.
While Taylor and other theorists of ‘community’ such as
Fukuyama (1995), Misztal (1996) and Putnam (2000) see the
social imaginary primarily as a common set of beliefs or
 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
expectations, shared amongst a (historically or geographi-
cally) distinct group of people, for Castoriadis the social
imaginary was the necessary means by which the social
exists. That such necessity creates the conditions for the
exercise of power and the manipulation of opinions is not to
be doubted. But the stability of any social imaginary relies as
much upon the organisational coherence it achieves – the
meaningfulness of social institutions and the cultural sym-
bols by which they are inter-related – as it does upon
engineering a rationality to cover human conflict.
The nature of such conflicts and the operation of stratified
power often have an ideological dimension. As we have
previously pointed out, for those taking a Marxist perspective
the construction and ‘interpellation’ of individuals as subjects
inevitably reproduces antagonistic class formations (Althusser,
2001:125). Even if social imaginaries cannot be ‘simply’
reduced to ideology, the parallel serves as a critical reminder
of the fact that however conducive to the good in society, social
imaginaries can at certain times and in certain contexts, betray
the interests of some while masking the interests of others
(Taylor, 2004: 183). For Habermas the resolution of this
dilemma lies in public communication and the search for
‘ideal speech situations’. But such a process presumes that
“from intersubjectivity one can derive fundamental criteria of
truth” (Larrain, 1994: 136) replacing the social imaginary with
social facts.
Instead of searching for universal criteria of truth and
facticity, however, for the purpose of understanding the fourth
age it is more useful to trace the meanings and symbolic
systems that societies use to socialize individual experiences
around old age. That all societies possess a shared understand-
ing of the ‘normal expectable life cycle’ was a major theme in
the work of the influential social gerontologist Bernice
Neugarten (Neugarten, 1974; Neugarten & Datan, 1973). She
argued that a common understanding of the ordering of later
life was contingent on the conditions of modernity. In the next
part of this paper we utilise our theoretical exploration of the
social imaginary to examine the nature of the ‘normal
expectable life cycle’ and the ways in which old age has been
socially positioned. This will illuminate how viewing the fourth
age as a social imaginary can be a key resource both in
understanding the complexities and fractures of later life and in
locating the negative consequences that such ‘imaginings’ may
have for those subject to the various discourses of the third and
the fourth ages.
The social imaginary and the modern life course
In this section we outline some of the ways that the life
cycle has been socially and symbolically represented in
Western societies. We will draw largely from European
sources although we would argue that there are no societies
in which the idea of the life cycle does not form a central
social imaginary. The life course conforms to the idea of a
social imaginary in the following ways:
(i) it is realised through social institutions that are framed
and made sensible by reference to age,
(ii) it operates through symbolic forms that distinguish
and represent ages as universal phenomena,
371
(iii) it is mediated through ‘popular’ narratives that
describe social roles or identities that define an
individual's place within the life cycle.
Little attention was given to the life course or to any of its
various stages — infancy, youth, old age, etc. by the ‘founding
fathers’ of the sociological canon (Gilleard & Higgs, 2013). It
may be that the life cycle was deemed too biological a construct
for these thinkers or that it was identified within an individual
rather than a socio-historical framework of change. Conse-
quently, the sociological exploration of the life cycle can be said
to have started with Karl Mannheim in his essay on the
‘problem’ of generations written in 1923 (Mannheim, 1952). In
this essay, he focused on the idea of ‘generation’ and
‘generational’ change. For Mannheim, generational distinctions
were formulated by and presaged upon youth as a sociologi-
cally distinct stage of life and youth movements as particular
social formations. The psychosocial importance of youth in
formulating social identity was later explored by the psycho-
analyst and sometime anthropologist, Erik Erikson. However,
although Erikson recognised the need to place the individual
life cycle in the broader context of society he never systemat-
ically developed this perspective, relying instead upon
individual, and somewhat gendered accounts of development
in all his principal writings (Erikson, 1950/1963, 1959/1980,
1982).
It was the American sociologist Talcott Parsons who
introduced the idea of age as a source of social structure in
one of the first analytical studies in the sociology of aging
(Parsons, 1942). Parsons, unfortunately, did not develop this
aspect of sociology and for some decades “there [was] little
development of what might be called a sociology of age”
(Neugarten, Moore, & Lowe, 1965: 710). It was left to Bernice
Neugarten to pursue the idea of a social system ‘that shapes
the life cycle’ by institutionalising expectations around ‘social
time’, ‘age grading’, ‘age status’ and ‘age norms’ (Neugarten &
Datan, 1973). Neugarten called for a sociology that could
address “the relations of life time, social time and historical
time” (Neugarten & Datan, 1973: 77). She was primarily
interested in the ‘modern’ history of the life course and the
changing timetable of the adult life course from the late
nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The ‘longue durée’
was first considered by Philip Aries, in his book Centuries of
Childhood (Aries, 1962) where he argued that childhood only
emerged as a distinct phase of life in the eighteenth century
as a consequence of the rise of the bourgeois family where
special attention began to be paid to child rearing. This
change was associated with the more distinct portraiture of
childhood and a concern over the specifics of children's
education. Aries followed this up later in his study of death
and the manners of dying (Aries, 1981) in which he explored
changing ideas about death as an end of life stage, from
antiquity to the present. Modernity, Aries argued, has
gradually made death ‘un-natural’ as the visible social rules
by which a life's passing was mourned are forgotten.
Despite such promising beginnings, the historical sociol-
ogy and social history of the life course were slow to develop.
Arguably they finally emerged as distinct sub-disciplines
through two distinct trends — in historical demography and
in the history of the family. Social historians like Tamara
Hareven were particularly interested in retrieving the life
372 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
cycle experiences of ordinary families and ordinary people,
rather than telling the story of the changing life course from
the vantage point of the wealthy and powerful (Hareven,
1976, 1994). She played a key role in developing the
sub-discipline of the history of the family — looking at how
families change and adapt under changing historical condi-
tions and how individuals and families synchronize their
lives to accommodate these changing conditions. In the
1980s, Michael Anderson provided an important examina-
tion of the changing life cycle in Britain drawing upon
demographic sources from the 19th to the 20th century
(Anderson, 1985) and from the 1980s onward, numerous
social histories of childhood, of teenagers, of middle age and
of old age began to be published (e.g. Benson, 1997; Cole,
1992; Cunningham, 1998; Gutton, 1988; Hine, 2000; Kett,
1993; Minois, 1989; Mitterauer, 1993; Thane, 2000).
Cultural histories of the pre-modern demarcation of the
life course emerged around the same time. Three books
addressing medieval interpretations of the life cycle were all
published in the same year (Burrow, 1986; Dove, 1986; Sears,
1986). The general point that can be derived from these and
related studies is that ideas about dividing life into stages and
ages are evident throughout recorded history — forming an
example of a core social imaginary (Cole, 1992: 5; Hareven,
1976: 15). Old age is commonly contrasted with youth and
periods of physical growth and development contrasted with
periods of decline and deterioration. The ‘prime of life’
seemed brief, quickly ceding to an old age that many now
would call ‘mid-life’ (Dove, 1986). Although the distinction
between a solid and a decrepit old age was commonly made
in antiquity and persisted through to early modernity this
rarely resulted in any obvious status differences or formed
the basis of any social institutions. Old age like most of the
stages of life remained polysemous, a time of riches, of
miserliness or of poverty; a time of authority and wisdom, of
cowardice and cuckoldry. Although the physical markers of
age – white hair, wrinkled skin and weakened muscles –
were regularly acknowledged as corporeal sources of an
‘aged’ identity, the significance of this loss of erotic and
aesthetic capital was always attenuated by rank (the elite
were relatively unaffected) and by gender (women's physical
aging was more often deemed uglier and linked to detri-
mental changes in character).
According to the American historian of aging, Thomas
Cole, “quintessentially modern ideas and images of human
lifetime were born” (Cole, 1992: 4) during the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, as “the endless circle or
cycle of human life [was] broken and replaced by a life course
modelled on a rising and descending staircase” (Cole, 1992:
5). The de-sacralisation of the poor insinuated itself across
the urban environments of early modern Europe, forming the
basis for more institutionalised forms of charity (Beier, 1986).
Old age became more closely linked with social and economic
status. As the modern nation state emerged and land was
replaced by capital, age began increasingly to structure
society through the institutional arrangements of education,
work and the poor laws (Gilleard, 2002). By the end of the
eighteenth century, public debates about the appropriate
organisation of the life course appeared and particularly the
kinds of systems and institutions needed to provide support
before and after working life (Condorcet, 1795; Paine, 1792,
chap. 5; Vancouver, 1796), leading to what Michael Anderson
has called the institutionalised life course of the late 19th and
early 20th centuries (Anderson, 1985).
From the mid-Victorian period onwards, old age became a
more worthy state, no longer denigrated by its bodily ugliness,
its framework of disease or its abject poverty. Old age became
decent or at least deserving of decency and increasingly was
portrayed as a period of rest and respectability — represented by
the ideal of a Darby and Joan sitting contentedly by the fireside
(Achenbaum, 1974: 49). If the social reality lagged behind this
imaginary, over the course of the twentieth century the
conditions of later life slowly improved. By the late 1980s
when Laslett published his book on A Fresh Map of Life rates of
poverty amongst the over 60s had fallen substantially in most
developed societies. They continued to fall through the first
decade of the 21st and in many cases, pensioner incomes rose at
a faster rate than that of average earnings (Department of Work
and Pensions, 2012; Wolff, Zacharias, & Masterson, 2012)1.
Systems of social security, corporate or occupational pensions
and rising housing wealth established for old age not just a
resting place at the end of working life, but an increasingly
secure arena in the life course capable of supporting new
possibilities for many and not just for a few. Through these
processes of securing mass retirement, the coherence of old age
fragmented, losing its place in the modern social imaginary and
metamorphosing into third and fourth ages (Gilleard & Higgs,
2011b).
The social imaginary of the fourth age
Later life in contemporary circumstances has lost much of
its previous ‘modern’ coherence. Diversity, difference and
inequality have become more salient. The market has increas-
ingly penetrated and exploited the social divisions that the
welfare state had once attempted to shore up. As the various
post-war cohorts have grown older, their lifestyle habits of
consumption have filled many of the spaces of later life and
increasing numbers of people in their sixties now embrace the
digital technologies of the late twentieth century. The new
‘cultures of aging’ that have become more prevalent and more
expansive over the last quarter century have established new
possibilities for spending one's time in later life (Gilleard &
Higgs, 2011c; Higgs et al., 2009). One consequence of this
expansion has been the parallel contraction in the space
occupied by ‘real’ old age. The brighter the lights of the third
age, the darker the shadows they cast over this underbelly of
aging — the fourth age.
1
The Pensioner Income series for 2010–11, issued by the UK govern-
ment's Department of Work and Pensions, reports that: “Pensioners' mean
net income has grown faster than earnings over the last twelve years. Net
income after housing costs for pensioner units has grown by 40% between
1998–99 and 2010–11 in real terms, whereas average weekly earnings for
the whole economy have risen by 11% in real terms over the same period.”
(DWP, 2012: 8). Later the report illustrates how this has changed rates of
poverty amongst pensioners: “In 1979, 44% of all pensioners were in the
bottom fifth Before Housing Costs and by 2010–11 this proportion had
halved to 22%. As increasing numbers of pensioners own their home
outright the improvement of pensioners' position in the net income
distribution After Housing Costs was more significant. On this measure
the proportion in the bottom fifth fell from 43% in 1979 to 13% in 2010–11”.
(DWP, 2012: 66).
 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
What has led to this re-imagining of old age? Four
processes we suggest have determined the ‘post-modern’
social imaginary of the fourth age. First, as already alluded to,
is the re-activation of the pre-modern legacy of a fourth stage
of life, when ‘senility’ [senium] was distinguished from ‘old
age’ [senectus]. This distinction can be found in the writings
of Aristotle, Galen and Varro; it was consolidated in the
writings of Avicenna and Joannitius; and re-introduced into
the West during the 12th century renaissance by the writings
of the scholastics such as Arnold de Villanova and Roger
Bacon and amplified by the medical writings of the
Renaissance (Gilleard, 2013; Schäfer, 2010). Second, has
been the medicalization of old age and the emergence of
geriatrics as a post-war institutionalised medical speciality,
designed to address what one of its earliest practitioners
called the “geriatric giants”: incontinence, immobility, insta-
bility (falls) and intellectual impairment — the symbolic
markers of ‘senility’ (Isaacs, Livingston, & Neville, 1972).
Third has been the expansion of ‘third age’ opportunities
with their emphasis upon sustaining adult identities and
lifestyles through consumption and the concomitant avoid-
ance of many if not most of the attributions of ‘agedness’.
Fourth has been the ‘densification of disability’ evident
amongst the population of people aged over sixty now living
in residential care settings, whereby mental and physical
frailty rather than material and social poverty determines
admission into long term care units (Higgs & Gilleard, in
press). What we aim to do in the rest of this paper is expand
upon these four processes – the pre-modern legacy of the
division made between a hale and a frail old age, the
mid-twentieth century medicalization of later life, the
post-war rise of a consumerist third age and the more recent
densification of disability in long term care – before turning
to consider the implications of our argument for a sociology
of later life.
The pre-modern legacy
The broadest division of the life course is that between
youth and age; youth marks the end point of life's
development; old age the period of its decline. But within
this particular binary has been the common recognition that,
just as youth can be sub-divided into childhood and young
adulthood, so too can later life be divided into a period when
adults are past their physical prime and a period defined by
an aged infirmity. This distinction was formulated in Latin
between ‘senectus’ [old age] and ‘senium’ [senility] or, if
applied to age groups, between ‘seniores’ [elders] and ‘senes’
[the aged]. While power, status and vitality were attributed
to ‘elders’, the ‘aged’ were seen to embody only weakness
and fragility (Schäfer, 2010: 14). Evident in the writings of
Aristotle, Galen and Avicenna this division of later life
persisted throughout the pre-modern era. According to the
16th century French physician, Andre du Laurens, the second,
final stage of old age “is called decrepite: in which … there is
nothing but paine and languishing griefe… [when]… all the
actions of the bodie and minde are weakened and growne
feeble” (du Laurens, 1599: 175).
Besides sustaining the coherence of Galenic physiology,
these distinctions helped support the Roman tradition of
‘patria potestas’, justifying older men occupying positions of
373
civic and ecclesiastical power (Gilleard, 2013: 206). By
counter-posing the idea that ‘old age’ as ‘senium’ was itself
an illness, it was possible to distinguish between a ‘natural’
and hence ‘valuable’ old age from ‘a sickly’ and ‘weak’ old age.
The former was seen to be influenced by Jupiter, ‘the planet
of the future lifetime, of peace and tranquillity’, while the
latter was dominated by the planet Saturn…‘treacherous,
brooding, gloomy, full of suffering and difficulty’ (Zerbi,
1489/1988: 32-3). Although an ‘undifferentiated’ old age
sometimes did determine ‘entry’ to positions of ecclesiastical
power or relieve people of the need still to bear arms, the
pre-modern distinction between ‘elders’ and the ‘aged’ did
not rely primarily upon fixed chronological age nor did it
possess any marked institutional significance. It was, prior to
modernity, more of a cultural than a social imaginary.
The medicalization of later life
A number of European and North American writers have
drawn attention to the progressive medicalization of later life
that took place over the second half of the twentieth century
(Estes & Binney, 1989; Kirk, 1992; Von Kondratowitz, 1991).
While the consequence of “the shift of old age from the
margins to the centre of the health care system” has had
positive effects (Conrad, 1998: 143) others have drawn
attention to less desirable effects. As Estes and Binney have
pointed out: “equating old age with illness has encouraged
society to think about aging as pathological or abnormal”
(Estes & Binney, 1989: 588). By equating the two it has been
possible for people over sixty to construe themselves as not
aged because they are healthy or aged if they are ill. At the
same time, society and Government began to address later
life primarily through a concern with sickness, disability and
care. Given this framework, even attempts to demonstrate
the very normality of health and well being in later life –
(e.g. Rowe & Kahn, 1987) – lead paradoxically to asserting
the categorisation of later life into ‘good’ versus ‘bad’,
‘successful’ versus ‘unsuccessful’ ‘healthy’ versus ‘diseased’
and ‘active’ versus ‘inactive’ re-introducing the pre-modern
distinction between ‘senescence’ and ‘senility’2.
Carroll Estes has pointed out that the bio-medicalization
of aging leads both to thinking of age in terms of disease and
to framing its social representations within the discourses of
healthcare. Old age is generally perceived as a growing health
problem dominated by discourses concerning frailty, depen-
dency and the ‘spiralling’ costs of long-term care. While
pre-modern public discourses on old age addressed ques-
tions of civic participation, household responsibility and
issues of appropriate sexuality and while modern discourses
centred on questions of labour productivity and poor relief,
the period since 1970 has seen the ‘health/illness’ binary
opposition dominate the debates regarding the framing of
later life (Estes, Wallace, Linkins, & Binney, 2001).
2
These terms come from William Sharpe's translation of the medical
writings of Isodore of Seville's (560–636 CE) Etymologiae (Sharpe, 1964:
49–50).
374 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
Long term care and the densification of disability
In 2006 researchers from the Open University in the UK
repeated a survey of care homes in England and Wales in
order to examine the “continuity and change over the last
50 years…in residential care for older people” (Johnson,
Rolph, & Smith, 2010:3). Despite attesting that the quality of
care and provision of amenities in residential long term care
had improved considerably over the period, the researchers
found that the residents themselves were generally older and
much more incapacitated in 2005/6 — with only one in five
deemed able to go outside the home without assistance,
when compared with the earlier study where almost two out
of three were able to do so in 1958/9 (Johnson et al., 2010:
Table 5.5: 91). Our point in drawing attention to this point is
that it is not the older people per se who are becoming more
frail or more incapacitated — if anything quite the opposite is
happening. In one Finnish study, for example, Pitkala and her
colleagues observed secular trends toward improved physi-
cal functioning, reduced incapacity and need for help
amongst the over 80s over a ten year period (Pitkala,
Valvanne, Kulp, Strandberg, & Tilvis, 2001). There is strong
and consistent evidence of downward trends in limitations in
late life functioning in most developed economies such as
Finland, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden and the United States
(Martin, Zimmer, & Hurng, 2011: 289). Taken together these
trends indicate that despite stable or improving levels of
functioning amongst older people in general, the disabilities
and incapacities of people entering long term residential care
have been increasing. This is what we refer to as the
‘densification’ of disability within long term care settings
(Gilleard & Higgs, 2010).
Casting shadows: the impact of the third age
If later life has become a progressively more important site
for healthcare over the last half century, and if there has been
a decline in competence and independence amongst the over
sixties' residents in long-term care homes, the other side to
this picture of disease and disability has been the expanding
role of consumption, leisure and cultural participation
amongst older people. Ownership of consumer goods, use of
domestic Information and Communication Technology (ICT),
time spent shopping and participation in sports and leisure
activities have all increased amongst recent later life cohorts
in the developed economies of the West (Higgs et al., 2009).
Though this expansion of the third age provides a counter-
weight to the bio-medicalization of old age and the densification
of late life disability, it too has impacted upon the formation of
the social imaginary of the fourth age by anchoring part of its
rhetoric upon ‘not becoming old’ (Gergen & Gergen, 2000). A
number of critics of the third age have argued that “it emanates
from a position of relative privilege”; or that it “denies the
developmental possibilities that can emerge from the… negative
features of old age”; that “in the effort to eliminate negative
stereotypes of old age, these narratives bring a new form of
ageism… directed at the less vigorous and less healthy” and that
“the emphasis on good health and relative affluence can serve to
undercut public policies that are essential for the late life
well-being of many older people” (Holstein, 2011: 232). While
most of these points can be challenged (e.g. the improvements
in care noted in the English study revisiting care homes after fifty
years), they point to an undeniable feature of the third age —
namely that it seeks distance from the negativity of old age.
The increased sales of Botox and skin creams to reduce
skin wrinkles and the rising numbers of people seeking
‘rejuvenative’ plastic surgery are not matched by growing
numbers of people taking out long term care insurance. It is
difficult not to interpret these trends as indicating anything
other than a flight from ‘deep’ old age, or at least the public
expression of a private preference not to be old. The shadows
cast by the fourth age serve to highlight the positive agency
expected from participants in the field of the third age.
Avoiding the ascriptions of agedness permeates the cultures
of the third age, and in so doing, makes of old age an ascribed
community imagined as much through the lens of the market
as the media and increasingly now the state. As welfare
policies struggle to redefine ‘unsuccessful aging’ as the failure
to maintain agency and control – to lose one's independence
and capacity to maintain a bed in the community on a
combination of benefits and pension income – so the dividing
practices of welfare and the objectifying discourses of frailty
autonomy deepen the hole from which the fourth age is
formed, as a kind of black hole from which the light of agency
becomes dimmed. It is here that the theme of the social
imaginary becomes productive and useful through its role in
promoting both the positive and the negative aspects of the
cultural field of later life. Speculatively, it could be argued
that the reason that considerable aspects of the social
imaginary of the fourth age are constructed in negative
terms is because in doing so they help promote a more
positive image of ‘normal’ aging than was possible in earlier
formulations of the lifecycle that operated with a more
singular view of old age as decline. At the same time, this
distinction – commonly expressed as that between ‘normal’
aging and ‘real’ old age – may also help older people
‘adjudicate’ their own and others' relative positions within
society (Degnen, 2007). Whether or not these distancing
advantages those not viewed as being in the fourth age – in
real old age – is a question that emerges from this bifurcation,
though it is not necessarily the only issue that emerges from
our usage of the term social imaginary.
Conclusions
Our aim in this paper has been to develop and extend an
understanding of the fourth age as an example of a late modern
social imaginary. Adopting the less totalising approach of
Castoriadis rather than that of other contemporary theorists
such as Taylor, we have sought to locate the idea of a ‘fourth age’
as a particular social imaginary representing a particular variant
of the ‘stages of life’ trope the origins of which go back to classical
Western antiquity. Thus we can identify the fourth age in part as
the re-emergence of the pre-modern distinction between
‘senectus’ [old age] and ‘senium’ [senility] or ‘senior’ [elder]
and ‘senis’ [the aged]. As attempts were made to define old age
in strictly chronological terms (Roebuck, 1979) this earlier,
pre-modern distinction (between ‘old age’ and ‘senility’) fell into
disuse to be replaced by the social category of ‘old age’ (Degnen,
2007; Gilleard, 2002). Its re-emergence we suggest can be
connected to three inter-linked phenomena — the medicaliza-
tion of later life, the densification of disability in long term care
 C. Gilleard, P. Higgs / Journal of Aging Studies 27 (2013) 368–376
and the emergence of the agentic cultures of the third age. As
with all social imaginaries, there are both positive and negative
consequences arising from the social framing of these phenom-
ena. This is particularly so in relation to framing the fourth age as
a ‘late modern’ social imaginary.
First there is the recognition that a sociology of old age is
increasingly difficult to demarcate. It is possible to undertake
a sociology of later life, or a sociology of aging, but under the
impact of the fourth age, the social categorisation of old age
now contains more than any social category of this type can
usefully hold — it is too full of contradictions, whether in
practice, policy or public narrative. Secondly, the social
imaginary of the fourth age serves to highlight the psycho-
social dilemmas between the subjective agency of care
recipients and the objectifying practices operated by the
agents of public and private community and residential care
(Weicht, 2013). It becomes possible to seek to shrink the
social space that the fourth age occupies in medical and social
care, by identifying those practices that support or resist a
fourth age social imaginary. Thirdly, the social imaginary of
the fourth age highlights the contrasting positions between a
disability versus a frailty framing of incapacity in later life and
the subtle ageism that can be observed within sections of the
disability movement that seek to maintain a forever ‘fit’ and
‘youthful’ image for disabled people. Finally, applying a
fourth age perspective to social imaginaries helps recognise
that besides any role in fashioning ‘trust’ and ‘social capital’,
social imaginaries also serve to alienate and distance aspects
of social life from the experience and understandings of the
majority. The fourth age is an example of a social imaginary
that creates what Bataille called ‘an abject class’ (Bataille,
1934/1999) whose defining feature is less what social or
economic goods they do or do not possess but rather the kind
of stranger we fear ourselves becoming.
Considering the fourth age as a social imaginary extends
the scope of understanding aging in both its social and
individual contexts. It allows researchers the capacity to
avoid an unhelpful undifferentiated view of the older
population while at the same time avoiding conceptually
limited distinctions between members of the older popula-
tion based on chronology, health, class or gender. Viewing
the fourth age as a social imaginary realised and revealed in
the discourses and practices of third persons opens up new
avenues for research. In particular the tropes, metaphors and
narratives evident in common discourse, in the media, in
policy documents and in professional papers provide scope
for investigating – and resisting – the nature of ‘dividing’
narratives and practices in society's dealings with older
people as an abject class.
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