Definition of "juvenocracy"

While we write, that Advent is in progress! It is the Advent of Youth—Juvenocracy in the ascendant! A flowery arch spans the breadth of Broadway, and under it winds, at this moment, the procession in honor of first maturity—manhood in youth! It scarce needed, it is true, that the world should be born again before its new monarch should make formal entry. It was, ten years ago, discovered in France—two years ago in England—last year in America—that the gray head was only the wisest while there were no books but experience! That which men once waited to know till the hair was silvered, is now taught the child at school—conned in the ambitious dream of the youth in his puberty. The world has “hung fire” in other ages, from the damp of burnt-out enthusiasm spread like a blanket over its brain-powder. Improvement has gone upon crutches. Action waited for enterprise to cough. Courage stayed to fumble for spectacles. The forenoon shadows of the sun of human intellect were of untrustworthy measure, and the dial to begin to work by was shadowed till post-meridian!

1845, N[athaniel] P[arker] Willis, “Part IV; Ephemera”, in Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, New York, N.Y.: […] Burgess, Stringer, & Co., […], page 151, column 2

This regnum juventi is the curse of our country and our age. It lays us aside, and it threatens to retire the naval and military branches of the Government on a pension! Fifty-three years is the limit of a naval officer’s active fighting or exploring life, recommended by the young men, and about fifty for a clergyman’s services as a parish minister! Soon the same rule will be applied to the Army, and to our whole educational system. Shades of Plato and Humboldt! What are we to do with this tyrannical Juvenocracy? […] Chancellor Kent wrote his commentaries after he had been “retired” from the bench, I believe, at the age of sixty-five, by the “Juvenocracy.”

1882 July 9, E. F., ““Juvenomania.” A Protest Against the Too Early Retirement of Efficient Officers on “Account of Age.””, in New-York Tribune, volume XLII, number 13,020, New York, N.Y., page 10, column 3

,‘JUVENOCRACY” IS COLLEGE FAILING […] “It is a new reign of juvenocracy,” said Dr. Anthony. The remedy, he suggested, in Shakespeare’s lines: “To thine own self be true and it then will follow as the night the day thou canst not be false to any man.”

1925 September 28, Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Me., page 12, column 5

Officials Enjoy Rest As Young People Rule Over Borough for Day / Brooklyn is a juvenocracy today. Youth rules the borough and age is ousted from office. Twenty-eight boys and girls from the borough’s high schools are “in” while all officials, from the Borough President down, are “out” playing golf, or something.

1937 April 29, The Brooklyn Citizen, volume C, number 101, Brooklyn, N.Y., page one, column 5

Q.—Spokane. — Gerontocracy means government by old men. What is the comparable word meaning government by young men? A.—There is no ready-made word for this. However, by combining the Latin word “juven” meaning “youth,” and “ocracy,” the Greek word for government, you get “juvenocracy.” Another word would be “hebeocracy,” employing the Greek word “hebe,” meaning “youth,” with the Greek word for government.]

[1962 April 14, “Reader Service”, in The Spokesman-Review, 79th year, number 335, Spokane, Wash., page 4

Should College Students Grade Their Teachers? The Risk Is ‘Juvenocracy’; Students and Teachers “In each generation a minority hears the call to find utopia”

1966 September 18, Lewis S. Feuer, “Should College Students Grade Their Teachers?”, in The New York Times Magazine, page 267

Adolescence is lengthened and the gerontocracy of ancient and modern times is succeeded by a juvenocracy, a phenomenon whose economic, sociocultural, and moral consequences are not yet fully measurable.

1968, Denis Szabo, “Psychocultural Basis of Contemporary Juvenile Inadaptation”, in Marvin E[ugene] Wolfgang, editor, Crime and Culture: Essays in Honor of Thorsten Sellin, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., page 97

The problem of group identity among the blacks is now being paralleled by the demands of youth for increased dignity and responsibility. This situation can be seen as part of a significant shift in sources of authority, away from the traditional gerontocracy and toward a sort of juvenocracy. On the most surface levels, it has expressed itself in the law in terms of legislation to lower the voting age and the various reforms of the military draft system.

1971, Christopher D. Stone, chapter, in Thomas C. Greening, editor, Existential Humanistic Psychology, Brooks/Cole, page 165

The recent worldwide outbreak of student movements and rebellions bears witness to the conflicts of another kind of “inheritance” situation in which the “juvenocracy” revolts against the situational definition of the “gerontocracy” in power in much the same way as peasants revolt against absentee landlords and workers against capitalist bosses.

1971, Joan Abbott, Student Life in a Class Society, Elsevier, page 5

It would come as no surprise to find that optimum science policy is apt to be developed neither by gerontocracy nor by juvenocracy but, like the community of scientists itself, by age-diversified meritocracy.

1972, Harriet Zuckerman, Robert K. Merton, “Age, Aging, and Age Structure in Science”, in Matilda White Riley, Marilyn Johnson, Anne Foner, Aging and Society, volume 3 (A Sociology of Age Stratification), New York, N.Y.: Russell Sage Foundation, page 337

Juvenocracy—i.e., when children and youth govern adults—has been academically developed and extended as a concept since the early 1970s. Since that time, scholarly thought has moved away from static modernistic attributions of power to focus more on how power relations are negotiated and unfold. Whilst early conceptualizations of juvenocracy rest on assumptions about existing structures, later theorizing rests on an affirmation of contingency. With this shift, studies of juvenocracy have come to address broader aspects of child and youth authority in adolescence processes and intergenerational relations, also conceptualized as ‘juvenocratic spaces’.

2020, Annika Skoglund, Mats Börjesson, “Juvenocracy: Juvenocratic Spaces”, in Daniel Thomas Cook, editor, The SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, London, New York, N.Y.: Sage