By Jon Savage. Viking, 549 pp, $37.50, hardcover

Barring the occasional black-metal sect or graffiti outbreak, today's youth culture seems to be in a stage of general quiescence following the upheavals of the hippie, punk, and rave eras. The adolescents I know are following their elders' pursuits while eschewing their excesses: they're learning to play Jimi Hendrix riffs without the aid of drugs; studying environmental theory while avoiding tree huggers' rhetoric; and planning how to change the world without having to destroy it first.

But anyone naive enough to think that this is one of those end-of-history moments is in for a rude surprise, as Jon Savage's ­Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture clearly surmises–even if its author isn't interested in predicting the future.

Savage's brick-sized tome ends in 1945: "Year Zero, the start of a new era heralded by the revelations of Nazi inhumanity and the unleashing of the ultimate terror weapon," as he points out. Rock 'n' roll, the pill, the Summer of Love, and safety pins through pimply noses are still to come.

We know about these, however. What many of us don't know is that youth culture as an identifiable social phenomenon predates Coca-Cola (1886), Seventeen magazine (1944), and the Beatles (1963). Focusing primarily on France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, Savage charts its cyclical ebb and flow, its relationship with greater economic and demographic trends, and its vanguard role in the arts. He describes its victories–breaking down class and racial barriers, exposing the fraudulent nationalism behind the slaughter of the First World War–and its failures, including the willing subjugation of many German teenagers to the hateful ethos of the Hitlerjugend. And he introduces us to any number of short-lived youth movements–the squabbling gangs of 1890s Manhattan, the nature-worshipping Wandervogel of 1920s Germany–that have obvious parallels with present-day subcultures.

Savage's thesis is essentially dialectical. History, he suggests, is pulled between conservative eras and periods of liberation; within that struggle, youth culture swings between self-generated radicalism and carefully manipulated consumerism. The heirs of Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud's nephew and the inventor of the public-relations industry, have the upper hand for now, as evinced by the legions of idiot nonentities masquerading as teen idols–but this will surely change.