L-R: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Emmanuel Todd
On Monday morning, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán received French historian and author Emmanuel Todd, a renowned researcher on the impact of social structures on political systems, at the Carmelite monastery.
On Tuesday, Emmanuel Todd will give a lecture entitled “Europe at the Crossroads” at a conference organized jointly by the 21st Century Institute and the Civic Hungary Foundation. The main theme of his presentation will be the deep socio-moral crisis behind the West’s loss of direction.
Viktor Orbán wrote about the meeting on his X account, saying that it was a pleasure to meet with Emmanuel Todd whose work he holds in high regard. “We spoke about the moral & societal decline of the West, a trend which will have dire consequences. In his view, Hungary stands out by holding firm to its sovereignty and resisting external pressure,” the Prime Minister emphasized.
Emmanuel Todd was born in 1951 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the website of the 21st Century Institute reads. Father of four children, grandfather of nine grandchildren. One of his great-grandfathers was of Hungarian origin. His father, Olivier Todd, is a renowned writer, friend and biographer of Albert Camus.
Emmanuel Todd began his studies at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and continued at Trinity College, University of Cambridge.
At the age of 25, he became a household name with the publication of The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere. This book was influenced by his first visit to Hungary in 1975.
After working for a time for the literary section of the French daily Le Monde, he returned to research, focusing on the links between social structures, particularly family structures and ideologies.
In his book After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, published in 2001, he argued that the United States of America had lost its status as the sole superpower and predicted, on the basis of economic, demographic and ideological indicators, that the balance of power in the world was undergoing a major shift.
His most recent book, The Defeat of the West, published in 2024, analyses the Russo-Ukrainian war. His analysis is sharply critical of the current state of the Western world, particularly the effects of the decline of Protestantism.
Related article
Stephen Nagy: Hungary’s National Interest Can Overlap with Asian Nations’
Via MTI, 21st Century Institute, Featured photo via MTI/Miniszterelnöki Kommunikációs Fõosztály/Benko Vivien Cher
