Todd attracted attention in 1976 when, at age 25, he predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, based on indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates: La chute finale: Essais sur la décomposition de la sphère Soviétique (The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere).[3]
He then worked for a time in the literary service of Le Monde daily, then returned to research, working on the hypothesis of a determination of ideologies and religious or political beliefs by familial systems (Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure & Social System, 1983). He then wrote, among other books, The Invention of Europe (1990) and The Fate of Immigrants (1994), in which he defended the "French model" of integration of immigrants.
Emmanuel Todd
Todd was opposed to the Maastricht Treaty in the 1992 referendum. In 1995, he wrote a memo for the Fondation Saint-Simon, which became famous — the media thereafter attributed to him the coining of the expression "fracture sociale" (social crack or social gap), used by Jacques Chirac during the 1995 electoral campaign in order to distinguish himself from his rival Édouard Balladur. Todd, however, has rejected the phrase's attribution to him,[4] and attributed the expression to Marcel Gauchet.
In After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2001), Todd claims that many indices that he has examined (economic, demographic and ideological) show both that the United States has outlived its status as sole superpower, and that much of the rest of the world is becoming "modern" (declining birth rates etc.) far more rapidly than predicted.[3] Controversially, he proposes that many US foreign policy moves are designed to mask what he sees as the redundancy of the United States. In his analysis, Putin's Russia emerges as probably a more trustworthy partner in today's world than the US. The book has been much read although many of its more original ideas have been received with scepticism.
In spite of his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, Todd expressed himself in favour of the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe in the referendum of 2005, advocating a protectionist framework at the European level for the future policies of the Union.
In A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World (2007), written with fellow demographist Youssef Courbage, Todd criticized Samuel P. Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilizations, pointing instead to indices of a convergence in styles of life and in values among civilisations.
Throughout much of this time he was working on "The Origins of Family Systems", which he has described as "his life's work". The first volume was published in 2011. He describes how in researching the book he has, over 40 years, "read more anthropology monographs than most anthropologists." He has described the book as "completed", with only the stage of writing up its second and final volume remaining.[5]
His 2015 essay Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d'une crise religieuse ("Who is Charlie? Sociology of a Religious Crisis") became his most controversial and his most popular essay. In the essay, Todd claims that the 11 January 2015 marches to show solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo staff who had been massacred by Muslim terrorists several days before were an expression not of French liberal values but of racist and reactionary currents in French society. The work has been accused by politicians of a seeming willingness to look aside from the reality of Islamist terrorism[6][7] while some readers accuse it of a reliance on unsupported a priori arguments while failing to consider other, more relevant political factors.[8] The book aroused copious and emotional hostility, including a critique by the Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls.[9] Todd claims to have written quickly, partly out of frustration and not in a purely academic style, though he defends his arguments' basis in his decades of French demographic research.[10]
Hi book Où en sont-elles? Une esquisse de l'histoire des femmes (translated in English as "Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women"), Todd argues that women have achieved emancipation and questions the existence of patriarchy in Western Europe.[11] The book has been met with both praise[11][12][13] and criticism.[14][15][16]
In La défaite de l'Occident ("The defeat of the West"), Todd announces the victory of Putin's Russia against a deindustralised and nihilist West, weakened by the decline of Protestantism. The book was received negatively in the West, where Todd was accused of being "blinded by ideology", "ignorant on the subject" and relying on Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories;[17][18][19][20] he was, however, praised by Christopher Caldwell on The New York Times.[21] In Russia, the book was well reiceived and praised by state and pro-government media.[22][23][24]
The claim that the Empire is American is questioned as such by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their Empire. They claim that the origins of the Empire are in Europe, not in the United States, based on the emigration of scientists from Europe to the United States, especially from Austria, during and around the Second World War.[29]
Quotes
The idea that, under the pretext that a country is democratic, its citizens, after an internal debate, can legitimately decide to bomb the citizens of another country is an idea that will end up killing democracy. The United States is a greater danger to peace than Iran.[30]
In popular culture
There is an implicit but clear reference to The Final Fall published in 1976, and its author, in Robert Littell's book The Company: A Novel of the CIA, a fiction, but with heavy historical inputs, on the American intelligence agency. In it, two analysts discuss in 1983 forecasts of the Soviet Union when from the outside, it was seen as a solid entity:
"The Soviet Union," one of the independent economists was arguing, "is an Upper Volta with rockets." He waved a pamphlet in the air. "A French analyst has documented this. The number of women who die in childbirth in the Soviet Union has been decreasing since the Bolshevik Revolution. Suddenly, in the early seventies, the statistic bottomed out and then started to get worse each year until the Russians finally grasped how revealing this statistic was and stopped reporting it." — "What in God's name does a statistic about the number of women who die in childbirth have to do with analyzing Soviet military spending?" a Company analyst snarled across the table. — "If you people knew how to interpret statistics, you'd know that everything is related—"[31]
A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World with Youssef Courbage, 2007, Columbia University Press, translated by George Holoch[33] (Le Rendez-vous des civilisations, 2007)
Who is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class, 2015, Polity Press, translated by Andrew Brown[34] (Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d'une crise religieuse, 2015)
Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus, 2019, Polity Press[35] (Où en sommes-nous? Une esquisse de l'histoire humaine, 2017)
Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women, 2023, Wiley, translated by Andrew Brown[36] (Où en sont-elles? Une esquisse de l'histoire des femmes, 2022)
Without an English translation
The Fool And The Proletariat (Le Fou et le Prolétaire), Éditions Robert Laffont, Paris, 1979. On the pre-1914 elites of Europe, which led to World War I and totalitarianism.
The Invention Of France (L'Invention de la France), with Hervé Le Bras (fr), Éditions Pluriel-Hachettes, Paris, 1981.
The Invention of Europe (L'invention de l'Europe), coll. «L'Histoire immédiate», 1990.
The Fate [Destiny] of Immigrants (Le destin des immigrés), Paris, Éditions Le Seuil, 1994.
The Economic Illusion: Essay on the stagnation of developed societies (L'illusion économique. Essai sur la stagnation des sociétés développées), Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 1998.
The Diversity Of The World: Family and Modernity (La Diversité du monde: Famille et modernité), Éditions Le Seuil, coll. «L'histoire immédiate», Paris, 1999.
After Democracy (Après la démocratie), Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 2008.
Allah is not to blame! (Allah n'y est pour rien!), Paris, Éditions Le Publieur, coll. arretsurimages.net, 2011.
The Origin Of Family Systems, Volume One: Eurasia (L'origine des systèmes familiaux, Tome 1: L'Eurasie), Paris, Éditions Gallimard, 2011, of which the translated introduction is already available online.
The French Mystery (Le mystère français), with Hervé Le Bras (fr), Paris, Éditions Le Seuil, coll. «La République des idées», 2013.
The Defeat of the West (La Défaite de l'Occident), Paris: Gallimard, 2024. ISBN9782073041135
Footnotes
↑ Todd, Emmanuel: After Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order
↑ L'idée que, sous prétexte qu'un pays est démocratique, ses citoyens, après délibération entre eux, ont la légitimité de bombarder les citoyens d'un autre pays est une idée qui va finir par tuer la démocratie. Les Etats-Unis sont plus dangereux que l'Iran pour la paix, interview in MarianneArchived 2009-05-08 at the Wayback Machine
↑ "Emmanuel Todd - Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus | Polity". politybooks.com. Retrieved 5 June 2019., commentary from renowned anthropologist and historian Alan Macfarlane: "Emmanuel Todd is an internationally known scholar whose work on the development and influence of family systems around the world has challenged many preconceptions. This is a bold, iconoclastic, wide-ranging study, marshalling a great deal of material from history, anthropology, demography and other disciplines. It is written from an unusual angle and rightly challenges the primacy of economic forces, emphasizing instead the role of family systems, ideology, education and culture in the shaping of human history. There is much to learn from this work." and Michael Lind: ""To the study of the United States, the Soviet Union and France, Emmanuel Todd has brought a unique combination of empirical rigor and humanist insight. Now, in Lineages of Modernity, this great thinker has found his greatest subject."
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