The book “After Empire” was published by historian Emmanuel Todd in 2001, and the book “The Defeat of the West” was published in 2024 (Al Jazeera)
Emmanuel Todt is a French historian, anthropologist, sociologist, and political analyst. He is Jewish by faith and is prolific. He is a rare thinker who relies on facts and data. He is considered one of the few remaining intellectuals of the old French school.
Todd was known for his keen strategic sense, as he had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union in his famous book, “The Final Fall,” which he published in 1976 when he was 25 years old, based on his theory of “family kinship patterns” and statistics on infant mortality rates in the Soviet Union.
After nearly a quarter of a century, Todd, who is accused of being hostile to the United States, published a book entitled “After Empire” (2001), in which he presented his arguments for the decline of America as a dominant global power, despite claims of its great victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The book “After Empire... A Study of the Disintegration of the American System” predicted the decline of America as a global power (Al Jazeera)
Defeat the West
The importance of Todd's proposals lies in his use of cultural factors in monitoring geopolitical data instead of the power struggle model that dominates strategic studies.
In January 2024, Todd’s new book, “The Defeat of the West,” was published, which immediately sparked widespread controversy upon its publication. It is the summary of Todd’s reading of the new international order in light of the Ukraine war that has been ongoing for two years.
Todd focuses on the main reasons that led to the fall of the West, including:
The end of the nation-state in the West.
Industrialization has declined, which explains NATO's inability to produce necessary weapons for Ukraine.
The Western religious matrix - i.e. Protestantism - reaches “zero degree” and bankruptcy, and the sharp increase in death rates in the United States is much higher than in Russia.
Increasing numbers of suicides and murders, and the prevalence of imperial nihilism expressed by a chronic obsession with eternal wars.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
If Karl Marx was the first philosopher of socialism, then the German sociologist, law professor, and thinker Max Weber is the undisputed philosopher and “godfather” of capitalism, as Weber monitored the capitalist phenomenon and its development in the Protestant world, especially the United States, and found a close connection between the Protestant moral system and the spirit of capitalism. Its emergence and development.
Protestantism embraced the ethic of discipline, commitment to work, reduction in consumption, saving, and postponement of pleasure, or “urban piety,” in Weber’s words, to create capital and reinvest the return of production and its expansion, which in turn has a close connection to the spirit of early capitalism, especially in the major European settlement societies.
These societies migrated and settled in the colonies as a result of religious persecution and famines that struck Europe in the era of geographical discoveries and the mercantile (commercial) period.
But the chronic crisis of capitalism - especially the current American neoliberalism that has been spread globally - is that it is not based on consumer discipline, but rather on maximizing consumption and making borrowing available to individuals, companies and governments excessively, so consumption has become greater than income, and the consumer is spending what he has not yet earned, which has reduced savings. It led to drowning in seas of debt that far exceeded the gross domestic product.
Thus, Protestantism, its morals, and its historical working mechanisms that led to the rise of the Anglo-American world evaporated.
Collapse of Protestantism
Todd attributes Western decline to the "evaporation" of Protestant values, and highlights the "values of work and social discipline" inherent in this branch of Christianity, which he sees as an essential element in the rise of the "Anglo-American world."
He considered that "the evaporation of Protestantism in America, Britain, and the Protestant world has caused the disappearance of what constitutes the power and peculiarity of the West, and that the central variable is religious dynamics."
The gradual internal collapse of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture has led since the 1960s to “an empire deprived of a center, a project, and a meaning, that is, an essentially military entity run by a group without a culture (in the anthropological sense),” is how Todd defines the neoconservatives in America.
Here we come to the core of Todd's argument, his post-Max Weber reinterpretation of the Protestant Ethic and its relationship to the spirit of capitalism. Weber's book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" - which was published more than a century ago (1904-1905) - came at a time when "Protestantism was the matrix for the rise of the West." Protestantism, the death of Protestantism today is the cause of disintegration and defeat.”
"Pillars of the West"
Todd clearly identifies how the English “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the French Revolution of 1789 were the true pillars of the liberal West, and thus the expanded “West” is not historically “liberal,” since it also engineered “Italian fascism, German Nazism, and Japanese militarism.” .
Todd highlights how Protestantism imposed universal literacy on the populations it controlled “because all believers must have direct access to the Bible, an literate population is capable of economic and technological development, the Protestant religion has fortuitously forged a superior and efficient workforce,” and in this sense Germany was “ "At the heart of Western development" even if the Industrial Revolution occurred in England.
Todd found similarities between the country's cultural history and the history of the Protestant West, and said, "What Protestantism and Communism have in common is the obsession with education," adding, "Communism, which was founded in Eastern Europe, developed new middle classes," where the decisive factor in the rise of the West was the connection with Protestantism by the alphabet, according to Todd.
Moreover, Todd asserts that Protestantism is twice at the heart of the West's history: through the educational and economic drive, with the fear of divine damnation, the quest for salvation, and the need to feel divinely chosen, generating a disciplined work ethic and a strong collective morality, and through the idea that human beings are not equal. (The White Man's Burden).
The collapse of Protestantism could only destroy the work ethic in favor of collective greed, i.e. (neo) neoliberalism.
Sexual transformation
Todd's sharp critique of the spirit of the 1968 student revolution in France seems worthy of a whole new book, as he points out that “one of the great illusions of the 1960s, shared by the Anglo-American sexual revolution and the May 1968 student revolution in France, was the belief that the individual would be greater if he was freed from the group.” ".
This led to an inevitable disaster, according to Todd, who says, “Now that we have been collectively liberated from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derivative, whether communist, socialist, or nationalist, we are experiencing an emptiness,” and he continues, “And thus we have become a large number of imitative dwarves who do not dare to think on their own.” "But they show that they are capable of fanaticism like the believers of antiquity."
Todd's brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely demolishes the campaigns for transgender freedom, from America to Europe, and will provoke serial outbursts of rage, as he sees transgenderism as “one of the banners of this particular nihilism of the West now, this drive to destroy not only things and people, But also reality.”
Here is an additional analytical benefit for Todd: “Transgender ideology says that a man may become a woman, and a woman may become a man, which is a false assertion, and in this sense close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism,” and it gets worse when it comes to geopolitical ramifications.
In tandem with many analysts in Russia, China, Iran, and among independents in Europe, Todd seems certain that the United States’ obsession - since the 1990s - with cutting Germany off from Russia will lead to failure, and he says that “sooner or later they will cooperate, as “their economic specializations determine that they are complementary.” He says that defeat in Ukraine will open the way, as the "force of gravity" works to mutually seduce Germany and Russia.
Unlike almost any Western "analyst" around NATO countries, Todd believes that Moscow is on its way to winning over the entire NATO alliance, not just Ukraine, taking advantage of the window of opportunity that Putin identified in early 2022.
Todd is betting on a time window of 5 years, meaning that the end of the game will be in 2027, he says, and it is useful to compare this with the estimate of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, as he stated last year, “The special military operation will end in 2025.”
Source: Al Jazeera