Luddites

Sometimes there are events that don't seem to fit into the Strauss & Howe model. The original Luddites were active in the early 19th century, during the Napoleonic Wars. The middle of a Fourth Turning hardly seems like a time to be opposed to the state of technology.  It seems much more like a Second Turning activity - another of those ones where the government activity isn't the important one. There is an Awakening in the United States in the early part of the century, although it appears that Europe and the U.S. were already out of sync at this point.  (That is, the American Revolution was the Fourth Turning for the United States, while it started with the French Revolution for Europe.) Even if we could conjecture that the U.S. and United Kingdom cycles were still tied together, the Luddites are a bit too early for that to make sense.  They are either late Fourth Turning or early First Turning, and it's not clear why they would show up there rather than at a time more conducive to their goals.

There are a number of ways one might make them fit. The Luddites could be compared to the Beatniks, who were also a First Turning phenomenon that attempted to escape the strictures of the modern world. (On The Road was written in 1951, based on road trips right after the war, and Kerouac is identified as the originator of the term.) Or one could suggest that their cause was unsuccessful because it wasn't the right time, as one might say similarly of the League of Nations. This might be an instance, though, where it's better to acknowledge that reality is more diverse than a model can always cover, and not everything has to fit perfectly.