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.