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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
In most developed countries there is a palpable sense of confusion about the contemporary state of the world. Much that was taken for granted a decade or two ago is being questioned, and there is a widespread urge to try and understand how we reached our present situation, and where we are heading. In this major new book, the leading sociologist, historical anthropologist and demographer Emmanuel Todd sheds fresh light on our current predicament by reconstructing the historical dynamics of human societies from the Stone Age to the present. Eschewing the tendency to attribute special causal significance to the economy, Todd develops an anthropological account of history, focusing on the long-term dynamics of family systems and their links to religion and ideology - what he sees as the slow-moving, unconscious level of society, in contrast to the conscious level of the economy and politics. He also analyses the dramatic changes brought about by the spread of education. This enables him to explain the different historical trajectories of the advanced nations and the growing divergence between them, a divergence that can be observed in such phenomena as the rise of the Anglosphere in the modern period, the paradox of a Homo americanus who is both innovative and archaic, the startling electoral success of Donald Trump, the lack of realism in the will to power shown by Germany and China, the emergence of stable authoritarian democracy in Russia, the new introversion of Japan and the recent turbulent developments in Europe, including Brexit. This magisterial account of human history brings into sharp focus the massive transformations taking place in the world today and shows that these transformations have less to do with the supposedly homogenizing effects of globalization and the various reactions to it than with an ethnic diversity that is deeply rooted in the long history of human evolution.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Front Matter
Foreword by Michael Lind
Preface to the English Edition
The English and the Americans
Distance from others
The crisis and the limits of anthropology
Reflections on the Anglo-American revolution
Notes
Introduction: The Differentiation of Family Structures and the Inverse Model of History
There is no economic mystery
The crisis in advanced countries
The conscious, subconscious and unconscious levels of societies: economics and politics, education, family and religion
The time of the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious
The densification and gradual differentiation of family systems
An ‘inverse model’ of history
Providing an accurate description of history rather than explaining it
The principle of divergence
Imperialism and feminism
Impossible futures
The Anglosphere at the heart of modern history
The real question raised by Germany and Japan: the role of the stem family and primogeniture in history
Forwards to the past
Notes
1 The Differentiation of Family Systems: Eurasia
The Neolithic revolution
From the nuclear family to the Eurasian communitarian family
The late emergence of the stem family in Europe, Japan and Korea
Notes
2 The Differentiation of Family Systems: Indian America and Africa
Indian America
New Guinea
Sub-Saharan Africa: a question of method and ideology
Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas
The West African communitarian family
Incomplete stem-family forms in the eastern highlands
In the south, archaic forms: the ‘matrilineal belt’ and a high status of women
Polygyny and its northwest/south gradient
Patrilineality versus AIDS
The recent patrilineal innovation in the extreme southeast
By way of conclusion: the nuclear family and the flexibility of the original Homo sapiens
Notes
3 Homo Sapiens
The original couple
Encampments, bands, villages and peoples
Flexibility of the local group
Exogamous families, endogamous peoples
Tempered family exogamy
The taboo on incest is original: the Westermarck effect
Undifferentiation as a general concept
The Celts, Germans and Slavs of original times
Division into peoples: the notion of relative identity
Notes
4 Judaism and Early Christianity: Family and Literacy
The Jewish nuclear family of original times
The neo-Assyrian and neo-Babylonian epoch: primogeniture and patrilineality
Hellenistic and Roman times: a bilateral reversion
The trompe-l’oeil of Jewish matrilineality
The educational patrilineality of Judaism
Bilinearity
The tempered exogamy of Judaism
The true Jewish family innovation: the protection of children
The Christianity of original times
Christian innovation 1: radical exogamy
Christian innovation 2: feminism
Christian innovation 3: anti-sexuality
Christian innovation 4: poverty as a limit experience
Is Paradise the real reward?
The two monotheisms and their families
The two stages of the universal
Notes
5 Germany, Protestantism and Universal Literacy
From Protestantism to literacy
The stem family and writing
From the stem family to Protestantism, and vice versa
From the stem family to literacy
Literacy and the intensification of the German patrilineal characteristic
Swedish and Russian trajectories
Notes
6 The Great European Mental Transformation
The ‘Western marriage model’ and the belated victory of the Christian rejection of sexuality
The paths of discipline
Destruction of the undifferentiated kinship network
An inner vertigo: the real question about Protestantism
The Protestant military state and the first nationalisms
Towards the economic take-off
Notes
7 Educational Take-off and Economic Development
Why England rather than Germany?
The stem family and industrialization
Notes
8 Secularization and the Crisis of Transition
Catholicism without equality: 1800–1965
The fall of Protestantism, 1870–1930
The fall of religion and the age of ideologies
Crisis of transition and ideologies
Family structures and ideologies
Religion and ideology
Notes
9 The English Matrix of Globalization
The essentialist impasse
Family and collectivity in England
State and family
Cycles in English history
Further in the past: Rome’s imprint in the countryside
The English manor
From the undifferentiated nuclear family to the absolute nuclear family
The transformation of the years 1550–1650
Internalization in individualism
Family freedom and political domination in England
Notes
10 Homo Americanus
The return to pure nuclearity
The absolute nuclear family as an ideal type: 1950–1970
Nuclear ideal and religious revivals
The moderate effect of immigration
Exogamy in the United States
Homo americanus, Homo sapiens
Homo americanus: the Black version
Notes
11 Democracy Is Always Primitive
Decentring democracy
The survival and development of representative institutions in Western Europe
From English oligarchy to American democracy, thanks to racial sentiment
The concept of ethnic democracy
The concrete universal of America, the abstract universal of France
Democracy is always primitive
Notes
12 Democracy Undermined by Higher Education
The second educational revolution: 1900–1940
Democracy peaks
The third educational revolution and how it was brought to a halt
The historical significance of stagnation
The return of educational inequality
Inequality in England and America
The Vietnam War as a revelation: ‘working-class war’
Academia: a machine to manufacture inequality
Economic inequality as a consequence
Ideological transformation, political crisis and the rise in material inequalities
Free trade and the ‘providential’ march to inequality
Notes
13 A Crisis in Black and White
Desegregation
The shaking of White democracy
The persistence of racial sentiment among those with primary and secondary education
Racial sentiment versus the welfare state: Republicans
The democratic adaptation: jazz and prison
The pathological dimension of the racial reaction: the large-scale confinement of the Blacks
The stratification of the Black community
The liberal gulag in Black and White
Notes
14 Donald Trump as Will and Representation
The rationality of the vote for Trump
Educational stratification and political choice
The citadels of the elite: Silicon Valley and Academia
Economic conflict is replacing racial conflict
Racial triumphalism and the Clintonian imperial project
Clinton’s control of the Black electorate: another betrayal by the elites
The Hispanic problem facing the Democrats
A democratic but still xenophobic renewal
Global project versus national project
The decline of the absolute nuclear family and the confinement of young people
The resistance of American youth to xenophobia
Notes
15 The Memory of Places
My initial depiction: a nuclear convergence after the transitional crisis
The immigration of the 1990s: divergence in the West
The separation of capitalisms
The infranational persistence of differences in France
Farewell to Freud
Weak values and the persistence of nations
Notes
16 Stem-Family Societies: Germany and Japan
Low fertility rates in Germany and Japan: the persistence of patrilineality
Childless women
The second demographic transition in the globalization process: a failure to adapt on the part of stem-family societies?
The educational divergence of the two stem-family societies
German and Japanese patrilinealities, Swedish feminism
The resistance of a collective consciousness: zombie nationalism
Economic advantage and demographic crisis
German extraversion and Japanese introversion
Notes
17 The Metamorphosis of Europe
Diversity of family forms on the edges of Eurasia
The diversity of religious impregnation
The triumph of inequality in Europe
The industrial Blitzkrieg in the West
The demographic destruction of Eastern and then Southern Europe
The ‘demographic’ foreign policy of Germany
The rush to the East
A bridge too far: migrant, patrilineal and endogamous communities
Post-democratic Europe: a normal world
Notes
18 Communitarian Societies: Russia and China
From the exogamous communitarian family to communism
The continuity of regional nuances: Putin and Lukashenko
The recovery of Russia: proof by demography
Russian fertility
A transformation in the kinship system?
The antithesis of the Anglo-American world
Military specialization and the equality of nations
China as an ideological object
The scepticism of demographers
A persistent patrilineal dynamics, in China and elsewhere
The memory of places: authority and equality in China
Russia as both an accident and a necessity
Notes
Envoi
Postscript: The Future of Liberal Democracy
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
The conservatism of the peripheral zones
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Stem family → Protestantism → Literacy
List of Tables
Introduction
Table 0.1
Life expectancy and ageing
preface
Table P1
Distance from Anglosphere values
Chapter 5
Table 5.1
Literacy rates for 15–24-year-olds in 1970 and 2000–2004
Chapter 7
Table 7.1
Literacy, fall in birth rate and economic take-off
Chapter 9
Table 9.1
What was the English nuclear family like in the thirteenth century?
Chapter 12
Table 12.1
Literacy in the United States and Europe around 1900
Table 12.2
Proportion of the population that has completed a course in higher education acc…
Table 12.3
Proportion of college graduates (or above) in the population of over-25s, accord…
Table 12.4
The new stratification of American society
Chapter 13
Table 13.1
The top 1 per cent in the West: 1900–2000, proportion of national income
Table 13.2
Education level by race in the United States in 2015
Table 13.3
Global incarceration rates
Chapter 14
Table 14.1
Evolution of death rate among 45–54-year-olds by level of education
Table 14.2
Young and old in the neoliberal revolution
Table 14.3
Young adults living with their parents in Europe in 2008, in %
Table 14.4
The American vote by age group in 2016 (%)
Chapter 16
Table 16.1
Status of women, homosexuality and birth rates
Table 16.2
Higher education according to the OECD. Percentage of 25–34-year-olds in 2011, i…
Table 16.3
The female advantage in higher education. Level of college education in the popu…
Table 16.4
Foreigners among the nations in 2012, in %
Chapter 17
Table 17.1
GDP per capita in 2014 in the countries of Europe (in $$, in purchasing power)
Table 17.2
Median hourly wage in 2014 in European countries
Table 17.3
Decrease or maintenance in population levels between 1995 and 2015
Table 17.4
Natural population growth and balance of migration in 2015, in thousands
Table 17.5
Origins of migrants to Germany (positive migratory balances)
Chapter 18
Table 18.1
The sex ratio in communitarian societies and several others, in 2010
List of Maps
Chapter 1
Map 1.2
The main family systems in Eurasia
Chapter 2
Map 2.1
Communitarian family and independent family in Africa
Map 2.2
Transmission of land by male primogeniture in Africa
Map 2.3
A possible representation of the Bantu migration
Map 2.4
Matrilocality and bilaterality in Africa
Map 2.5
Polygyny in Africa
Map 2.6
The spread of AIDS in Africa
Chapter 5
Map 5.1
Literacy in Europe around 1930
Map 5.2
The stem family in Europe
Chapter 6
Map 6.1
Age at marriage of women in Europe around 1930
Chapter 8
Map 8.1
Religions in Europe
Chapter 15
Map 15.1
Cohabitation with relatives between 1982 and 2011 in France
Chapter 17
Map 17.1
Family types in Europe
Map 17.2
Authority and inequality in Europe
List of Graphs
Chapter 12
Graph 12.1
Higher education in the United States: the case of generations who reached the a…
Graph 12.2
The development of the income of the wealthiest people in the United States
Chapter 13
Graph 13.1
The proportion of the wealthiest 1 per cent in the United States, the United Kin…
Graph 13.2
Drug use by White and Black pupils in the final year of secondary school
Graph 13.3
Drug-related arrest rates (per 100,000)
Graph 13.4
Homicide rates between 1960 and 2002 (per 100,000)
Chapter 14
Graph 14.1
Fall in income of American households between 1999 and 2015
Graph 14.2
The rise in White death rates between 1999 and 2013 (45–54 years)
Graph 14.3
Income in relation to education between 1991 and 2012
Chapter 16
Graph 16.1
Progression of higher education in seven countries
Graph 16.2
Higher education in Sweden
Graph 16.3
Higher education in Japan
Graph 16.4
Higher education in Germany
Chapter 18
Graph 18.1
Infant mortality in the East
Graph 18.2
Progress of higher education in Russia
Graph 18.3
Progress of higher education in China
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
For Laurent
Lineages of Modernity
A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus
Emmanuel Todd
Translated by Andrew Brown
polity
First published in French as Où en sommes-nous? Une esquisse de l’histoire humaine© Éditions du Seuil, 2017
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3449-4
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Todd, Emmanuel, 1951- author.Title: Lineages of modernity : a history of humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus / Emmanuel Todd.Other titles: Ou en sommes-nous? EnglishDescription: Cambridge : Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018037566 (print) | LCCN 2018046524 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509534494 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509534470 (hardback)Subjects: LCSH: Civilization--History. | Ethnohistory. | Families. | Social structure. | Democracy--Social aspects.Classification: LCC CB151 (ebook) | LCC CB151 .T5313 2019 (print) | DDC 909--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018037566
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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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FOREWORD
Nobody who reads Emmanuel Todd could have been surprised by the election of Donald Trump. Before the businessman and reality television star shocked the world by becoming President of the United States, the French social scientist and public intellectual had anatomized the conditions that made such a disruptive event possible: the polarization of American society as a result of the hollowing-out of American manufacturing by globalization, and the failure of a foreign policy that masked the limits of American power with what Todd called ‘theatrical micromilitarism’.
Had Todd written his pessimistic analysis in 2014, he would have been prophetic enough. But he published it in 2001, in his book After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. At the time, conventional wisdom held that the post-Cold War emergence of the United States as the sole remaining superpower had inaugurated an age of ‘unipolarity’. European and Japanese alternatives to Anglo-American neoliberal capitalism had failed. Countries that wanted to grow needed to obey the rules of the Washington Consensus – liberalization, deregulation and privatization. And history had ended, according to Francis Fukuyama. Liberal democracy was the final outcome of humanity’s political evolution, and the chief threat to the human race in the future would be boredom.
This was not the first time Todd had been at odds with the elite consensus on both sides of the Atlantic. A quarter of a century earlier, following the US withdrawal from Indochina, the Soviet Union appeared to many to be more powerful than ever. In 1976, in response to claims that the Central Intelligence Agency downplayed the Soviet threat, President Gerald Ford appointed then-Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush to organize a ‘Team B’ of outside experts who, after re-evaluating intelligence reports, claimed that the CIA had consistently underestimated Soviet strength.
In the same year, then only twenty-five years old, having examined Soviet social indicators such as increasing infant mortality rates, Todd published The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere. As in 2001, when writing about underlying American weakness, in 1976, when writing about underlying Soviet weakness, Todd was prematurely and unfashionably correct. If Untimely Meditations were not the title of a collection of essays by Nietzsche, it would make an apt summary of Todd’s work.
That work is virtuosic in its variety and impressive in its depth, ranging from a study of the elites of pre-First World War Europe, Le Fou et le prolétaire (1979), to social developments within Muslim societies, A Convergence of Civilizations: The Transformation of Muslim Societies Around the World (with Youssef Courbage, 2007). In an age of growing distance between scholastic university research and clickbait Internet punditry, Todd has managed, against the odds, to be an influential public intellectual as well as a rigorous scholar. Although Todd denies paternity of the term, his influence is said to have led French president Jacques Chirac to invoke the idea of ‘the social fracture’ in his 1995 campaign. And in 2015, the prime minister of France, Manuel Valls, denounced Todd’s controversial book Who Is Charlie? Xenophobia and the New Middle Class, in which Todd argued that public demonstrations of solidarity with the victims of the terrorist attack on the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo disguised currents of xenophobia and reaction in French society.
For nearly half a century, between publishing his insightful analyses of the Soviet Union, the United States and France, Todd has been constructing an impressive body of thought linking the values of historic and contemporary societies to different family systems. In Lineages of Modernity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus, Todd unites his complementary roles as anthropologist and historian, scholar and public intellectual. The French thinker puts Anglo-American civilization at the centre of modern global history, writing that
‘it was England and her daughter America who were, and remain, the true revolutionary nations’. Todd notes the paradox that it was the very fact that the individualistic Anglo-American family was primitive, in anthropological terms, that made possible the incubation of liberal modernity in Britain and its settler states. And he presents another paradox: at the very moment that the rest of the world is catching up with a previous wave of Anglo-American liberalism, Brexit and the Trump presidency may represent the next phase in Anglo-American liberal evolution, a check upon ultra-liberalism: ‘The choice for advanced societies does not lie between elitism and populism, between openness and closure, but between negotiation and disintegration.’
For my part, I would hesitate to argue that a thinker who has been right so often about contemporary societies like the Soviet Union and the United States is wrong about the contemporary world. Whether readers agree or disagree with Emmanuel Todd, in Lineages of Modernity, they will find a worldview as revolutionary as the world revolution it describes.
Michael Lind
INTRODUCTION: THE DIFFERENTIATION OF FAMILY STRUCTURES AND THE INVERSE MODEL OF HISTORY
The West lies in thrall to a strange sense of helplessness, despite a technological revolution that had apparently made everything possible. Goods, images and words can circulate freely and quickly. There are harbingers of a medical revolution that will allow human life to be wonderfully extended. One Promethean dream leads to another. Between 1999 and 2014, the proportion of Internet users worldwide increased from 5 per cent to 50 per cent. Countries have been transformed into villages and continents into districts.
In the most developed countries, however, the sense of decline is spreading, together with an inability to arrest it. In the United States, the median household income fell during the same period from $57,909 to $53,718.1 The mortality rate of White Americans aged 45–54 has increased.2 The revolt of the White electorate led, in November 2016, to the election of an unlikely and alarming candidate, Donald Trump.
In various ways, other democracies seem to be following America down this regressive economic and social path. The rise in inequality and the decline in the standard of living among the younger generation are virtually universal phenomena. Populist political forms of a new kind are rising up almost everywhere against the elitism of the upper classes. However, we can sense a certain variety in these imitations. While Japan seems to be turning in on itself, Europe, with Germany now at the helm, is turning into an immense hierarchical system, even more fanatical than the United States in its devotion to economic globalization.
There is no economic mystery
The economic explanation for these phenomena is easy to find. Critical analysis has largely managed to account for them since the early 1990s. Free trade and the free movement of capital, while permitting a rise in the rate of profit, have also led to a depression in ordinary incomes, a rise in inequalities, a deficit in global demand worldwide, and, at the end of a mad dash, the return of economic crises. Far from being emancipated by technology, the most advanced of the world’s inhabitants are once more falling under the yoke. Job insecurity, declining living standards, sometimes even life expectancy: our modernity closely resembles a march towards servitude. For those who experienced the dreams of emancipation of the 1960s, the collapse of these hopes, in barely a generation, is astonishing.
Those interested in the economic mechanics of these phenomena have an abundant literature to refer to, including work by Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman and Thomas Piketty on the dynamics of inequality and its depressive effects.3 Note that some economists have taken their discipline to its very limits: James Galbraith has revealed that ultra-liberals now rely heavily on the state to enrich themselves, while Pierre-Noël Giraud has demonstrated that the logic of the Homo oeconomicus could lead to the claim, in certain quarters, that some human beings are ‘useless’.4
Still, most establishment economists are feeble or indeed conspicuously absent when it comes to the criticism of free trade. They dare not suggest that free trade might be moderated by a few mechanisms of control. Too daring a critique would jeopardize their positions in academia, or – even worse – in the profession’s prize-giving system.5 This passivity is no great theoretical loss. We can find all we need on the real effects of free trade in Friedrich List’s The National System of Political Economy, which dates back to … 1841. This is a classic: we can also read John Maynard Keynes’s articles as well as a more recent book by Ha-Joon Chang, a Korean based in Cambridge, England.6 In my L’Illusion économique, written in 1997, I emphasized the depressive effect of unregulated trade on a globalized economy.7 We should also remember, quite simply, that Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, did not envisage an untrammelled free market that would deny the reality of nations and their higher interests.
In spite of the high quality of all these studies, we must admit that the regression of the advanced world is not, as a purely economic phenomenon, a very interesting subject of study. What continues to fascinate me, on the other hand, is the feeling of powerlessness that persists despite our efforts at understanding: we have the diagnosis but we do nothing; we just passively witness the unfolding of the economic sequence.
The great recession of 2008–9 gave the impression that a return to a Keynesian type of action with the restoration of tariff barriers was necessary. Insufficient demand is in fact the central concern of Keynes’s famous General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and a minimum of common sense leads to the conclusion that, without protectionism, a revival in the domestic economy leads to the creation of demand for one’s neighbours rather than for oneself. For a short time, American, English and French newspapers all came together to celebrate Keynes’s comeback. Robert Skidelsky, the greatest of his biographers, even wrote a book with the title Keynes: The Return of the Master.8
The years 2010–15, however, forced us to realize that this lucidity had evaporated. During the 2016 US presidential election, the eruption of the debate on free trade and protectionism led by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump took establishment journalists and politicians by surprise and made eminent economists very angry. Sixteen Nobel laureates and two hundred members of the most prestigious American universities petitioned against Trump and in favour of free trade, without succeeding in convincing the American people, whose living conditions, insensitive to the beauties of the theory, were continuing to deteriorate. How can we explain today the persistent intellectual backwardness of those specialized elites who, after denying the deadly effects of free trade in the United States and Europe, are now denying Trump’s election? How can we explain this multidimensional refusal of the reality of the world, by serious people who have studied their subject at length? That’s the real mystery.
Between 2010 and 2016, then, the march to inequality resumed and the global shortfall in demand became ever more threatening. The growth rate in emerging countries fell, reaching zero in Brazil. China itself, the factory of the world, is suffocating in an industrial pollution worthy of the nineteenth century, teetering on the verge of a crisis with incalculable geopolitical consequences. In this floundering economic world, whose political systems are in disarray, we are warned ever more insistently, day by day, that populism is a threat to our ‘values’ and that we must defend them. But what values, basically? Inequality? Poverty? Insecurity? Ah, no, sorry: it’s ‘liberal democracy’, a now hollow concept emptied of its founding values – i.e., the sovereignty of the people, the equality of human beings and their right to happiness.
Thus, what we need to explain is not strictly speaking economic. It is rather the absence of any real awareness, i.e. one that would lead to action – this absence is what the historian of the present must understand. But in order to do so, we have to admit that the movement of history is not limited to the economic sphere alone, and that certain vital transformations occur in the deeper layers of social life.
The structures I am going to discuss are banal, obvious even, but we will be forced to admit that they are even more decisive for human actions than is the economy: they include education, religion, the family and, finally, the nation, which represents only the belated and current form of group belonging, without which the life of Homo sapiens is deprived of meaning.
