Lineages of Modernity

“To the study of the United States, the Soviet Union and France, Emmanuel Todd has brought a unique combination of empirical rigour and humanist insight. Now, in Lineages of Modernity, this great thinker has found his greatest subject.”Michael Lind, author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

“Emmanuel Todd provides intellectual nourishment of the first order. His family-based, anthropological-historical account uncovers another part of the hidden wiring of human development and provides a welcome antidote to the relentless economism of so much contemporary analysis. And for those of us unfamiliar with the Todd perspective, he writes with clarity and erudition, marshalling a huge amount of evidence to provide a fresh but undogmatic perspective on the modern world, usually with half an eye on the ancient one.”David Goodhart, member of the Policy Exchange think-tank and author of The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics

“Emmanuel Todd is an internationally known scholar whose work on the development and influence of family systems around the world has challenged many preconceptions. This is a bold, iconoclastic, wide-ranging study, marshalling a great deal of material from history, anthropology, demography and other disciplines. It is written from an unusual angle and rightly challenges the primacy of economic forces, emphasizing instead the role of family systems, ideology, education and culture in the shaping of human history. There is much to learn from this work.”Alan Macfarlane, Life Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge

“Vast and mind-expanding”The Independent“[Todd] Uncovers the hidden wiring of modernity using his own special historical-anthropological method — which predicted both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Donald Trump.”Evening Standard

Emmanuel Todd is a sociologist, demographer and historical anthropologist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), Paris. He was one of the first scholars to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union and is the author of many bestselling books, including After the Empire and Who Is Charlie?