Emmanuel Todd (1951) is a French historian, anthropologist, and demographer. He studied Political Science and History, and completed his doctoral dissertation on the anthropology of rural communities in France, Italy, and Sweden during the 18th and early 19th centuries, under the guidance of Peter Laslett, the leading scholar in the history of family structures, at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
He served as a researcher at France’s National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) from 1984 until his retirement in 2017. During those years, he highlighted the influence of ancient family structures on modern ideological choices and later studied the emergence and diversification of these family systems.
He became known to the general public when he predicted the fall of the USSR in 1976, at the age of 25, with his book La chute finale (The Final Fall).
He has published a significant number of books, including: L’Invention de l’Europe (1990), La Diversité du monde – Famille et modernité (1999), L’Origine des systèmes familiaux, Tome 1: L’Eurasie (2011), La défaite de l'Occident (2024, Greek edition: Η ήττα της Δύσης / The Defeat of the West)
