Who is Reading Emmanuel Todd Now?

Those commentators on public affairs who want to avoid a particular political label often display pretenses to greater idiosyncrasy in their outlooks than they really possess--and get away with it the more easily in America, at least, because in the hypocritical squeamishness about "ideology" that has prevailed for decades our politics are so much a matter of responses to disconnected issues, with the reality that larger premises about the world are involved in their responses is relentlessly downplayed. (Indeed, the so-called punditry seems scarcely able to use terms like "conservatism" and "liberalism" correctly--and compounds its disservice to all dependent on it by vehemently defending its own incoherence and ignorance in the name of "common usage.")

Still, it does seem to me fair to say that Emmanuel Todd's politics have genuinely defied easy labeling--and certainly when one looks at the longer sweep of his career. Reading The Final Fall, for example, one finds that Todd is no Marxist, or even socialist--but he was prepared to credit Marx with identifying some of capitalism's weaknesses, and capitalist reformers with redressing them, such that I think he could be safely identified with support for the post-war "Keynesian" compromise and the center-left as it stood then. He also seems to have adhered to this position in subsequent decades, even as the center-left increasingly accommodated itself to neoliberalism, and neoconservatism, of which Todd became a staunch critic, certainly as seen in works like After the Empire, and his commentary up to the present.

In the process Todd came to seem "left" of what had become center-left, even if not necessarily "left" in the old sense. Meanwhile, it is the case that in looking at less solidly material aspects of life he has set himself apart from many at this end of the spectrum. While Todd has been a formidable opponent of racial and religious bigotry, who has explicitly declared himself on the side of both women's liberation and gay and lesbian liberation, the fact remains that he has also turned a critical eye on American "multiculturalism," the #MeToo movement, the discourse about trans persons, and the decline of religiosity, all of which would seem to have been unhelpful to him in these quarters--while actually appearing to get him attention from some quarters of the right.* Certainly surveying the press Todd has got for his latest book it has seemed to me that it has been publications of the right that have been more likely to mention his work, favorably citing his remarks about the consequences of Protestantism's decline in its old North European and North American core--even as they take little interest in the rest of what he has to say.

* Todd specifically raised the matter of multiculturalism in After the Empire, where he saw it as indicative of an America that was becoming less universalist and more differentialist--while arguing that the American multicultural model was failing (interestingly, on the basis of infant mortality data such as was so important to his famous argument about Soviet failure), and also having some critical words for American feminism on this score. Todd has been more attentive to the matter of gender in Lineages of the Feminine, and The Defeat of the West.