Emmanuel Todd

Gail Kelly had us read Emmanuel Todd’s, The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, shortly after it was first released in 1985. She loved the breadth of the work and I recall her musing, “Mr. Barker, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be French? To be so certain you were right?” That Gallic confidence – nay, the raw arrogance – and audacity of scale impressed her.

Todd has surfaced again and his work is being tested

Many years ago, Emmanuel Todd came up with a classification of family types and argued that the historically prevalent family types in a society have important consequences for its economic, political, and social development. Here, we evaluate Todd’s most important predictions empirically. Relying on a parsimonious model with exogenous covariates, we find mixed results. On the one hand, authoritarian family types are, in stark contrast to Todd’s predictions, associated with increased levels of the rule of law and innovation. On the other hand, and in line with Todd’s expectations, communitarian family types are linked to racism, low levels of the rule of law, and late industrialization. Countries in which endogamy is frequently practiced also display an expectedly high level of state fragility and weak civil society organizations

Guttmann and Voigt, March 2021

Data-testing grand visions is always death by Lingchi; ethnographic exceptions to the rule start to pull the focus downward, cloud the clarity of the broad view.

But the scale of the work is precisely why it is important – to remind us to look for the universal connections, the Claude Levi-Strauss common mind of mankind.

The nattering noise of individual “truths” will no doubt only further focus attention on the parsimonious understanding of sociology.

>Here< is a good overview of Todd’s work.