In 1976, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union stood as a superpower competing with the United States across every domain, deploying its armies throughout the Eastern Bloc, and extending its political influence across most of what was then described as a bipolar world. Yet in the autumn of that same year, a young and obscure French researcher in historical demography, barely twenty-five years old, published a book titled The Final Fall.
The student was Emmanuel Todd, and he was preparing to defend his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge in Britain. Todd’s predictions appeared laughable, or at best wildly strange, given the formidable power the Soviet Union projected at the time. But the years passed, and Todd’s prophecy unfolded with astonishing precision.
Rather than examining the country’s condition using traditional tools of political analysis, Todd was able, through demographic studies, to dissect Soviet society and reach conclusions that would be proven correct thirteen years later, elevating him to the ranks of the most prominent philosophers and scholars of his era.
Demography is a branch of sociology and human geography concerned with the scientific study of population characteristics such as size, distribution, density, composition, ethnicity, and elements of growth including birth rates, death rates, migration, disease prevalence, economic and social conditions, life expectancy, gender, income levels, and more.
In demographic research, scholars like Todd employ mathematical and statistical tools and algebraic equations to forecast the future of societies by analysing their present and past. For this reason, Emmanuel Todd considers demography the only branch of the social sciences that can truly be described as a science.
The West’s Defeat
Today, Todd, now a renowned historian and anthropologist whose fame has spread across continents, returns with an even more controversial theory in a book titled The Defeat of the West.
The accuracy of Todd’s first prophecy granted him a degree of prominence in the research world, yet he has remained a figure of controversy. His predictions and analyses often shock French and Western audiences, and his latest prophecy is that the West is on the verge of defeat.
Todd is an unconventional intellectual with equally unconventional positions. A reader might encounter one of his opinions and assume he belongs firmly to the far left, only to find in the next chapter an analysis that appears unmistakably far-right. This multidimensionality has exposed him to constant accusations.
On one hand, he is a thinker who attacks neoliberalism, globalisation, and economic policies that deepen class inequality, while supporting welfare-state policies and state intervention to redistribute wealth and uphold social justice. He is also a vocal critic of American imperialism and the economic policies of the European Union. After the Charlie Hebdo attack he boldly criticised French secular extremism. All these positions might place him within the left.
But on the other hand, Emmanuel Todd insists on preserving cultural and religious traditions. He has dedicated significant portions of his writings to demonstrating how abandoning religious values and fully submitting to ideologies such as gender identity politics harms the future of Western civilisation. He argues that the West may collapse if Protestantism collapses, as Protestant values formed the foundation of Western civilisation. He even notes that the growing prominence of Jews and Catholics in the American political scene signals a form of decline. These views could easily lead a reader to classify him as right-wing if read without context. Understanding this requires a closer look at the philosopher.
Todd, born in 1951 into a culturally elite family in the suburbs of Paris, graduated from the Paris Institute of Political Studies and obtained his PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. His diverse background helps explain his use of interdisciplinary methods to interpret the phenomena he studies. He relies heavily on economics and deep demographic data, alongside the research tools of sociology and political science.
Todd places significant emphasis on religion in his analyses. As a historian belonging to the school of long-term historical study, he does not examine phenomena in their narrow or immediate details but through extended historical trends.
His book The Defeat of the West, published at the beginning of this year, is considered one of his most important works. Although it has not yet been translated even into English, it has stirred widespread controversy across the Western world, from the United States to Eastern Europe.
The reason is not only that Todd’s past predictions came true, but also the timing of the book. At a moment when the West is fighting in Ukraine and supporting Israel in its genocidal war against the Palestinian people, Todd tells Western audiences that they are heading toward defeat. He demonstrates through extensive datasets and multiple indicators that the West is standing on the edge of collapse. Todd says he attempted in this book to free himself completely from the fear of moral judgement and to assess the scene scientifically and without ideological bias.
Give the Iranians a Nuclear Bomb to Achieve Peace
Before examining his central thesis, it is important to understand the broader range of Todd’s views, which shape his independent and controversial perspective on global affairs, especially his reading of international politics beyond the dominant Western narrative.
For example, Todd warned as early as the 1990s that the West’s oppression of Palestinians and its disregard for their suffering must be corrected. He argued that the West cannot live off the memory of the Second World War for a thousand years, because this fixation blinds it to the injustice inflicted upon Palestinians and makes it unconditionally supportive of the Israeli occupation. According to Todd, such a posture prevents Europe from having any meaningful influence in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Todd also goes as far as arguing that Iran should possess a nuclear weapon because this is the only path to peace in the region and the only way to stop the Israeli occupation army from its unchecked aggression. For Todd, equal nuclear deterrence creates stability, not monopoly. The Soviet Union’s possession of nuclear weapons prevented the United States from using its arsenal against Soviet territory, unlike what happened to Japan during World War II. Likewise, if Iran acquires a nuclear bomb, Israel will be forced to stop killing and displacing Palestinians without consequence.
Beyond these controversial geopolitical opinions, Todd’s most important philosophical foundation lies in the tools he uses to analyse and forecast the future. While analysts typically focus on economic and cultural structures, Todd turns to smaller social units such as family structures: whether families are nuclear, extended, or sectarian, and whether familial bonds remain strong or have eroded. By mapping these micro-patterns, Todd connects them to the political systems likely to emerge in a given society, whether authoritarian or liberal democratic. A rise in nuclear families, for example, may threaten the longevity of authoritarian regimes.
More broadly, what distinguishes Todd’s analyses is his extensive use of population science, demographic indicators, birth rates, and education levels to predict political and social changes. When he predicted in 1976 in The Final Fall that the Soviet Union would soon collapse, he based this on data unrelated to conventional political analysis: statistics such as infant mortality rates and declining birth rates in the Soviet Union.
Initially, Todd’s method received little attention, but once the Soviet Union collapsed, his demographic-based approach gained serious recognition.
Emmanuel Todd Surprises Everyone
Perhaps one of Todd’s most controversial analyses was his interpretation of the mass marches in France after the Charlie Hebdo attack, in which the magazine had published caricatures insulting the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. After the attack, demonstrations erupted across France condemning the violence and reaffirming what they described as freedom of belief, Enlightenment values, and national unity against religious terrorism. The marches of 11 January 2015 came to be seen as sacred and symbolic, and “the spirit of 11 January” became a phrase used by writers and thinkers to describe the indomitable spirit of France.
Todd, however, abruptly dismantled this narrative. He declared Charlie Hebdo a poor magazine and argued that the marches reeked of fascism. He described the participants as “zombie Catholics”. The demonstrations, he argued, emerged from France’s most Catholic and most Islamophobic regions, particularly western France and Lyon. Although the people there no longer practise Catholicism, they remain saturated with Catholic social values, hierarchical structures, and conservative familial norms, far removed from secular ideals. Todd described them as “elderly deviants socially raised on a religion they have abandoned”.
To Todd, the demonstrations did not defend freedom of belief and expression alone. Rather, they excluded those who rejected terrorism yet opposed the inflammatory caricatures, considering the drawings foolish and needlessly provocative. The marches were, in his view, a performance of power and a spectacle directed at an oppressed minority: French Muslims, primarily the children of migrants and labourers. The working class, he noted, did not participate. Only the Catholics did.
Todd’s remarks triggered a storm of criticism. The French press accused him of being an “obnoxious intellectual”, a “blasphemer against 11 January”, “absurd and deceitful”, and “complicit with terrorists”. Todd countered that it was ironic that those who rallied to defend “freedom of expression” sought to silence anyone who criticised them. He added that mocking religion in France is no longer merely a right but has effectively become an obligation, pushing Muslims on television to declare their support for the offensive caricatures in order to prove they are truly French.
The West’s Defeat
Decades after his successful prediction of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Todd returns to the same statistical tools to offer a new prophecy: the defeat of the West. In his book published by Gallimard at the beginning of 2024, Todd uses extensive empirical evidence to demonstrate industrial decline in the United States, deteriorating educational standards since the 1960s, spiritual decay, collapsing family cohesion, and the global shift toward models that oppose Western dominance. Through these indicators, he sketches a bleak future for the West.
Just as his earlier work examined hidden demographic signs of Soviet decay, Todd now examines similar indicators in Russia and concludes that the picture has transformed completely. Under Putin, alcohol-related deaths dropped from 25.6 per 100,000 to 8.4, suicide cases fell from 56,934 to 20,278, homicides from 41,090 to 9,048, and infant mortality from 19 per 1,000 births in 2000 to 4.4 in 2020. The significance of this last figure, Todd notes, is that it is now lower than the American rate of 5.4.
For Todd, such indicators matter far more than Western corruption indices, which he considers subjective and misleading. While those Western metrics suggest overwhelming Western superiority, the difference in infant mortality rates between Russia and the United States suggests, in Todd’s view, that the United States has become more corrupt than Russia.
Todd, now accused by many in the West of serving as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, illustrates through data how Russia has advanced while the United States has regressed. The United States produces fewer cars and less wheat today than it did in the 1980s. It is also producing fewer engineers than Russia, not merely proportionally but in absolute numbers. American PhDs in engineering have sharply declined in recent decades.
While Russians increasingly pursue professions that build nations, Americans gravitate toward services, law, and finance: sectors that merely transfer value within the economy rather than create it, and sometimes even destroy it. In general, Todd argues that while Western governments chase short-term gains to secure re-election, rival states pursue long-term strategies that allow them to achieve substantial domestic and global progress.
Todd urges us to reflect deeply on Russia’s ability to withstand Western sanctions after the war in Ukraine without collapsing. Russia, he argues, built its economic and technological independence over years of preparation. Meanwhile, the West could not supply Ukraine with sufficient ammunition, despite the fact that, just before the war, the combined GDP of Russia and Belarus amounted to only 3.3 percent of Western GDP. Yet Russia managed to produce more weapons than the entire Western bloc. Todd concludes that conventional Western political economy has been exposed as fraudulent and that GDP is no longer capable of explaining reality.
Todd argues that economic, educational, and corruption-related indicators point to the West teetering on the edge of defeat. He also devotes significant attention to family structures and spiritual life. Todd, like many philosophers, maintains that the Protestant Reformation was the foundational pillar of Western educational and economic advancement, as Protestantism elevated the value of work and learning. Now he observes two critical developments.
The first is that the Protestant elite that once built Western civilisation through values of labour and knowledge has transformed into ruling oligarchies saturated with neoliberal greed. This elite has even vanished from the highest levels of power in the United States. For the first time in the Biden administration, no white Protestant held a senior leadership position. Instead, Jewish officials dominate key government roles. Todd emphasises that he himself descends from a Jewish lineage, yet he highlights this trend to explain its political implications.
The second is what Todd calls the West’s arrival at a state of religious zero in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. This has produced a collapse in values, meaning, and purpose. Western societies no longer suffer merely from a lack of spirituality, but from an almost total absence of religious conviction. As a result, Western values no longer appeal to the rest of the world as they once did. The West has become a symbol of nihilism. The Western family model, already severely damaged by the breakdown of paternal authority in the past decade, now threatens societal stability and fails to command global respect.
