Where Are We Now?

The engine of Todd's whole system is a set of family types built from two questions. First, when the father dies, do brothers inherit equally, or does one son take everything? Second, do grown sons stay in the parental household with their own families, or do they leave? Answer those two questions and you get a handful of basic structures, each carrying, in Todd's argument, a distinct set of buried political instincts.

Take the absolute nuclear family, dominant in England and its offshoots. Children leave, and inheritance is a matter of the parents' free will — no rule forces equality between the kids. Todd reads liberalism straight out of this: a world of free individuals, comfortable with inequality, suspicious of the state telling anyone what to do with their property. Then take the egalitarian nuclear family of the Paris basin — children leave, but brothers inherit in strictly equal shares. Here liberty and equality sit together, and Todd finds the temperament of the French Revolution, universalist and rights-obsessed.

The most striking test of the theory, for Todd, is the twentieth-century map of communism. If it were really an idea competing on its merits, it should have spread more or less at random, following books, parties, and Comintern money. Instead, he points out, the countries that went durably communist form a suspiciously tidy pattern: Russia, China, Vietnam, parts of the Balkans, northern Italy, the red belts of central France. Overlay that on his family map and, he argues, you find the communitarian and egalitarian-authoritarian structures underneath almost every one.

The same logic runs through his reading of the developing world. Todd built part of his early reputation on tracing waves of literacy and falling birth rates, arguing that the demographic transition — the moment a society learns to read and starts having fewer children — triggers ideological upheaval. A generation of newly literate young people, in a household structure that primes them for equality-under-authority, is his recipe for revolution. It let him treat events from the Iranian revolution to the Arab uprisings as legible rather than mysterious, each one the collision of new literacy with an old family form.

Step back from the particular claims and the real ambition of Where Are We Now? comes into focus. Todd is trying to do something most social scientists gave up on decades ago: to explain politics from a single, deep, quasi-universal cause. Not a story of ideas persuading people, not a story of economies pushing them, but a story in which the invisible architecture of the household, laid down over centuries, silently sets the terms for everything that follows. It is grand theory in an age that mostly distrusts grand theory, and that is both its appeal and its problem.

The objections come fast and from serious quarters. The most basic is the worry about determinism. If Russia was going to be communist because Russian brothers shared a roof, what room is left for accident, leadership, defeat, the sheer contingency of who won which battle? Critics accuse Todd of reading the outcome back into the family map, of choosing the correlations that fit and quietly setting aside the ones that don't. A theory that can explain the French Revolution, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Brexit with the same small set of household types is either profound or unfalsifiable, and reasonable people have landed on both sides.

The man who once forecast a superpower's collapse from an infant mortality figure wrote Where Are We Now? as the summation of a lifetime spent insisting that the numbers beneath our feet matter more than the slogans above our heads. From prehistoric nuclear households to the anxieties of Brexit Britain, the book asks us to see politics as the visible weather of a deeper, slower climate — the family structures that shaped us before we ever formed an opinion.