Emmanuel Todd's La Défaite de l’Occident Gets Noticed By the American Press

As I previously remarked, the response to Emmanuel Todd's latest (La Défaite de l’Occident--in English, The Defeat of the West) seems to have been strongest on the right, which was predictably delighted by much of what Todd (though not a rightist, and in the past and even the new book having said much not pleasing to the right) wrote here about religion, gender and education. Indeed, the first review of his book I spotted in a major English-language publication was Scott McConnell's in The American Conservative, while when The New York Times recently ran a guest essay about Todd's book it was by the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell (in yet another reminder of just how off the mark are those who think the Times a "left" or even a "liberal" paper rather than the centrist one it actually is, and just what exactly "centrism" means in a media outlet where who gets a platform and who does not are concerned).*

It was accordingly noteworthy that Michael Ledger-Lomas reviewed the book for the Jacobin (a publication hardly likely to turn to a far right commentator for their view of this book).

Ledger-Lomas' piece is notable for its attentiveness to Emmanuel Todd's history as a social scientist, from his formative influences in his youth, to his embrace of the "anthropological turn" in French intellectual life and establishment of a reputation for himself as a thinker with 1976's The Final Fall to the present--albeit with a distinct slant. Skipping over Todd's After the Empire, which seemed to me an important stepping stone toward this book's argument (and skipping over, too, Todd's Lineages of the Feminine, which also seems to me important given what he argues here), Ledger-Lomas slights the more material aspects of Todd's case as he (perhaps not unreasonably) emphasizes their more-discussed claims about the passing of the Protestantism of America and northern Europe from the "zombie" stage to the "zero" stage and its implications--which Ledger-Lomas treats rather critically. Indeed, Ledger-Lomas contends that while Todd's "portrait of America and Europe's post-Christian nihilism" can be "gripping" and even "overwhelming," and may even appear "vindicated" by particular foreign policies, the book is also "less scientific and more anecdotal" than Todd's prior works, with this posing special risks inasmuch as Todd's book is so much devoted to the "power of a political unconscious" in which "the analyst will find . . . whatever they find amusing or convenient to put there." Ledger-Lomas particularly argues for the hugely important discussion of "dechristianization" suffering from a "breezy crudity," reflected in Todd's identification of the "zero moment" for Protestantism with the acceptance of gay marriage seeming to him "strangely arbitrary." Indeed, Ledger-Lomas finds Todd's optimism about Russia and pessimism about Europe both misplaced--and along with these, the expectation of some form of German-Russian rapprochement implausible.

The result is that while it seems to me that there is much here that seems to me essential to the book and meriting more mention than it got in an over three thousand word review (Ledger-Lomas making only the slightest reference to Todd's discussions of Western deindustrialization, and none at all to Russia's soft power, for example), in discussing what he does regard as the core of the book Ledger-Lomas eschews both the uncritical embrace of those on the right who find Todd's argument a validation of their views, and the sneering dismissal of critics like Le Monde's Florent Georgesco, to offer that rarity--a balanced consideration of this French bestseller now getting so much press in a country where books not available in English are usually not even recognized as existing at all.