Of Neoliberalism and Feminism: Emmanuel Todd

In the United States the attention to the scholarship and commentary of demographer and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd has been exceedingly inconsistent and uneven, reflecting the biases of its publishers and its press. Exemplary of this Todd's Où en sont-elles? Une esquisse de l’histoire des femmes was almost totally ignored, precisely because for the Park Avenue which rushed to release an English-language edition of Todd's fellow French author Pauline Harmange's Why I Hate Men to a rapturous reception from les claqueurs of the review pages (remember, though, you're not allowed to even mention misandry exists, let alone say that any feminist anywhere has ever hated men, ever) was absolutely not going to give his study of gender a major release in the American market, or even any at all (even, it seems, after an English-language translation did get published in Britain as Lineages of the Feminine: An Outline of the History of Women).

Nevertheless, from what I have seen of the discussion of Où/Lineages the book does, as can be expected of Todd, offer a great many arguments sufficiently original and striking to warrant some acknowledgment. Not the least of these is his argument that the ascent of feminism helps explain the <>neoliberal era. Todd specifically argues for an innate difference between men and women with regard to the capacity for collective action rooted in the prehistoric sexual division of labor between male hunters and female gatherers. (The hunt was a collective affair, requiring men to cooperate in the pursuit of big game, which was for the sake of feeding the tribe as a whole--while the hunters' other distinct province, physical defense of the tribe, entailed the same stress on cooperation to collective ends. By contrast the female gatherer gathered food individually, for just her family--often in competition with other females. And the associated selection process conduced to a male orientation to collective action on behalf of the needs of the group, and a female orientation to individual self-interest.) The result is that the increasing participation of women in formerly male spheres meant increasing participation by people less inclined or able to support group action in furtherance of a common interest, undermining the capacity for doing so--such that as neoliberalism goes from disaster to disaster the opposition to the ever more unpopular consistently fails to win any meaningful successes (with, of course, Todd's France under the rule of Emmanuel Macron a case in point).

In considering this unconventional position it is only fair to acknowledge what Todd gets right. He is quite correct to note that the era of feminism's ascent has been the era of neoliberalism's ascent; and that, contrary to what some "idealist" analysts fixated on intellectual history seem to think, it has not been the result of popular credence in Friedman and Hayek, at least. Meanwhile, if Todd's conception flies in the face of the conventional stereotypes (ruthlessly competitive men, empathetic and cooperative women) the image of men as having the greater capacity for concern for the welfare of the group and collective action to that end in comparison with more individualistic women may be something one ought not to dismiss too quickly. Certainly looking at mainstream feminism today one is struck by how ultra-individualistic, and indeed, ultra-capitalist, it is, the prevailing vision one of the release of women from the traditional constraints of society and family so that, unencumbered by husband or children, they can most fully participate in capitalist society's labor force to take their chances in "life's race" as atomized individuals--and they are sure, flourish, because THEY DON'T NEED ANYONE, LEAST OF ALL A MAN. Exemplified by the cult of the "career woman" climbing the corporate ladder or founding a startup (like girl genius Elizabeth Holmes!), feminists conventionally judge women's advances not by the condition of working women broadly but how many women have made it "to the top"--and never miss a chance to punch left at those who prefer as a metric the good of the many rather than the privileged few, and see the gap between the bottom and the top as something to reduce. Indeed, it may seem significant that if in America there is a patron saint of selfishness, especially as it relates to capitalism, that would be a woman (Ayn Rand), while if Britain has a comparable figure that would be the woman who said "Society--there is no such thing," all as it does not seem unreasonable to, given her extreme hostility to ever letting the Social Question enter into politics, count alongside them Hannah Arendt, all as one would be hard-pressed to name a female thinker of the left of comparable standing in society at large. Meanwhile what we see of party politics hardly contradicts the image. In our "first"-obsessed age it is notable that the "first" woman to head government in nation after nation has done so at the head of a party of the avowed right, and indeed headed government only as heads of parties of the right (Thatcher in Britain just the first of three Conservative female Prime Ministers versus zero for Labour as a fourth woman now also heads the same party in opposition, with the sole female Canadian, German, Italian, Japanese heads of government to date likewise of the parties of the right), while women also lead the predominant far-right movements in many a country (Prime Minister Meloni in Italy, Le Pen in France, Weidel in Germany).

In its way even popular culture seems to tell the story. Popular fiction for men often validates the sense of worth of the low-status man at the expense of his so-called betters, as with the blue-collar heroes of so much action-adventure, who save the day as the white-collar higher-ups snivel or get in the way, whereas fiction for women seems more inclined to validate the hierarchy and those at its top. Endlessly valorizing the high-status male, and with him the system and hierarchy of which he is a part (often pointedly celebrating men in many quarters seen as economic and social villains, like Jack Welch acolyte-type "restructurers" of corporations), it is equally prone to denigrate the low-status male, the more in as, rather than admitting to finding him undesirable because of his lack of wealth and status (because of course only a vile sexist would believe the lie that any woman anywhere cares how much money a man makes!) attributing his lack of "net worth" to his lack of worth as a human being because if he were worthier he would be richer in the most cruelly conformist manner imaginable. Meanwhile the tale validates its core audience by telling it that it is worthy to be up on the heights by showing it rising to the top and being accepted there to live above the hoi polloi rather than finding pride and satisfaction at the bottom. Often this is through marriage to a higher-status male--marrying the prince, often literally, as in the endless output of made-for-TV romantic comedies by Hallmark and like outlets that present royalty from the apparently innumerable English-speaking countries of continental Europe marrying working American women who in the end win over their skeptical mothers-in-law. However, the tendency seems to transcend that convention, with the work of Shonda Rhimes striking for its particular combination of strident feminism with the most reactionary romanticizing of feudalism and monarchism from The Princess Diaries to Bridgerton, generally to the delight of the idiots of the commentariat.

Still, I am less inclined to explanation by way of evolutionary biology than I used to be--not because I disbelieve in biology, or dismiss the possibility of biological differences between the sexes a priori (the pharmacology industry shows just how much biology does matter, while I'm not big on a priori anything), but because as yet we are in a far better position to generate hypotheses than properly test them given the limits of our knowledge of both human genetics, and the evolutionary record. Not knowing much about how genes specifically interact with an environment to generate behavior we can only speculate, in however informed a way; while even if we could establish that on a firmer basis than we have done (as, indeed, I imagine sustained, robust, research into the matter would do in time) we would still be hard-pressed to reconstruct why people evolved as they did rather than how, such that claims of this kind for now may be just so many "Just so" stories. (Indeed, if many do argue logically and sincerely for their positions on this basis it still seems telling that people so often refer to evolutionary biology when they want others to accept something they find unpalatable on the grounds that "It's science!"--alas, without the science being there yet, with Francis Fukuyama nicely summing up the tendency when he pointed to how conservatives attribute almost everything they see as a societal problem to genetics except homosexuality, while liberals see nothing at all as genetic except homosexuality, two positions that are as absurd as they are self-serving.) At the same time Todd's own arguments about women's propensity for the public sphere over the private, and for traditionally feminine care work, seems to me to at least complicate any argument of this kind. And in any event, it seems to me that the emergence and endurance of neoliberalism is all too easily, and more satisfactorily, explained in other ways.

Even so, I certainly do think that there are important connections between feminism as we know it, and the neoliberal era. If the feminism we have has for the most part been "bourgeois feminism" that seems to me to reflect the fact of that feminism's emergence within and adaptation to a bourgeois society that will not stand any other kind. (Consider, for instance, what became of environmentalism as a result of the pressures and enticements to that movement to play by their rules of "legitimate discourse.") If it is female thinkers of the right who have had the most visibility influence, that seems to be because it is the intellectual right that has had visibility and influence, such that female thinkers of the left, like all other thinkers of the left, cannot get the same level of attention. If it is as politicians of the right that women have risen to high political office, that is because it is the right that has predominated electorally, though I would also be prepared to argue that the right's particular position within the system has made giving the party a female face a different matter for them than it is for their at least nominally leftward counterparts. (For a left-leaning party to run a woman for office is, especially in a time when they have alienated their bases and depend on winning undecided voters, a source of anxiety that doing so will alienate some voters who might otherwise be won over. For a right-wing party more confident in the loyalty of its base, doing so seems a good way to take advantage of the pseudo-left's a-candidate's-gender-is-more-important-than-their-platform identity politics, and allay women's concerns about the right's indifference to or hostility to their preferences with regard to such matters as reproductive rights. This is all the more in as, one should remember, whatever may be decisive for them here, women are historically more likely to vote for the left option than their male counterparts, with all that implies.) And if those forms of popular culture directed at women seem more blatantly affirmative of the status quo than those aimed at men on this particular level, one should not underestimate the fact that those blue-collar heroes are themselves still individualists upholding the status quo whose principal beneficiaries are those white-collar types they mock at, and the sop to their pride meant to reconcile them to society as it is, with all its inequities, rather than a serious criticism or call to change. Meanwhile one can hardly dispute that like the other forms that identity politics has taken in our time it has deflected attention from class and its associated material issues as it fosters division among a public increasingly reduced to fighting over the table scraps in an ever more unequal order--with that seeming to me far more important than any innate difference in gender in enabling the politics of the neoliberal turn.