THE COMING ON OF YEARS: SOCIAL SCIENCE PERSPECTIVES ON AGING AND DEATH.

The article presents social science perspectives on aging and death. The reason that presidential addresses are seldom explicitly about aging is that despite some recent growth of interest the vast majority of social scientists do not see the subject as one their central concerns. There is a widely held view that the recent emergence of concern with aging, old age, and the life cycle is a phenomenon which has its genesis in the demographic changes characteristic of modern societies. These changes, the long run decline of fertility and mortality and the consequent increase in the number and proportion of older people in urban-industrial societies, require no elaboration, and undoubtedly they are the chief source of our present interest. But if one looks beyond the narrow confines of the social sciences, one becomes aware that concern with aging and the life cycle is not new. Obviously a concern with aging and old age is more a matter of perspective than of demographic change. The absence of a life cycle perspective has had two related consequences. The first was that when we were suddenly faced with the social problems, we had neither a body of fact nor of tested theory to apply. The second consequence was that we ignored the potentialities of the life cycle for testing theories of social structure and social change.