Emmanuel Todd

Life and works

Born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Yvelines, Emmanuel Todd is the grandson of the writer Paul Nizan, the son of the journalist Olivier Todd (fr), and the father of the historian David Todd. Todd has Austrian Jewish ancestry. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who pioneered microhistory, was a friend of the family and gave him his first history book. Aged 10, Todd wanted to become an archeologist. He studied at the Lycée international de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was a member of the Communist Youth. He then studied political science at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and went on to prepare a Ph.D. in history at the Trinity college of the University of Cambridge with Peter Laslett. He defended his doctoral thesis on Seven peasant communities in pre-industrial Europe. A comparative study of French, Italian and Swedish rural parishes (18th and early 19th century) in 1976.

Todd attracted attention in 1976 when he, at 25 years old, 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).

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.

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 paternity 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 this paternity, 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. 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.

His 2015 work Qui est Charlie? Sociologie d'une crise réligieuse has become his most controversial and his most popular essay. In it, he claims that the 11th of January, 2015 marches to show solidarity with the victims of recent terrorist attacks in France were not an expression of positive French values but of racist and reactionary elements in France. The work has been accused by politicians of a seeming willingness to look aside from the reality of Islamist terrorism while some readers accuse it of a reliance on unsupported a priori arguments while failing to consider other, more relevant political factors. The book aroused copious and emotional hostility, including a critique by the Prime Minister of France, Manuel Valls. 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.

Criticism

In After Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order Todd proposed that the September 11, 2001 attacks revealed the voluntary nature of people's slavery. This revelation, however, is not alone a sufficient base for claims that the era what Todd calls American is ending. There are management technologies that do not depend on public induced expectations or affections. The claim that the Empire is American is questioned f.e. by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their Empire, claiming that the origins of the Empire are in Europe, not in the United States. This claim is based on the emigration of scientists from Europe to United States, especially from Austria, during and around the Second World War. These scientists include Ludwig von Mises, John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, Friedrich von Hayek, among others. Milton Friedman and Alvin Toffler have European origins, since Friedman's parents were from Kingdom of Hungary and Toffler's parents from Poland.

With an English translation

Without an English translation