# Book review: The Explanation of Ideology

Book review: The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structure and Social
Systems, by [Emmanuel
Todd](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Todd).

What features distinguish countries that embraced communism from
countries that resisted?

Why did Islam spread rapidly for a century and a half, then see
relatively few changes in its boundaries for more than a millennium?

Todd\'s answer is that the structure of the family is a good deal more
stable than ideologies and religions, and different family structures
create different constraints on what ideologies and religions will be
accepted. Published in 1983, it still seems little-known.

Maybe this neglect is most pronounced in the English-speaking parts of
the world, where one family structure is overwhelmingly popular, and
alternatives are often dismissed as primitive relics. France seems more
conducive to Todd\'s insights, since France has four different family
structures, each dominating in various regions.

Here are the main dimensions that he uses to categorize family
structures:

-   Exogamous: [marriages between
    cousins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage) are heavily
    discouraged, versus endogamous: marriages between cousins are
    common.
-   Nuclear versus community: Are children expected to move away from
    the parental home upon marriage?
-   Equal versus unequal. Beware that this is a nonstandard meaning,
    focused on relations between brothers, especially on whether
    inheritances are split equally. Todd says this is inversely
    correlated with sexual equality. He seems willing to accept sexual
    inequality as not worth trying to eliminate (\"male dominance, a
    principle \... which is in practice much more universal than the
    incest taboo\").
-   Liberty versus authority. This is mostly about parental authority
    over children.

![map of family
systems](https://external-preview.redd.it/9PricctWVU77AVY3PjVuMG4yEwkjkVYKMCapiKL7q1U.png?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=027ae2fafc27a0cd2a6b92823762e73d34cacdb3)

Here are his categories, listed in roughly descending order of how many
Europeans practice them (this is Todd\'s order; the book is a bit
Eurocentric).

### Exogamous Community

This system is equal, authoritarian, and universalist. It mostly
coincides with countries that adopted communism at some point, plus
Finland and northern India.

It is relatively unstable, tending to produce features such as
communism, which wages war on the family, and urbanization, which pushes
toward a more nuclear family. But then why is it the most populous
family system (41% of the world population when the book was written)?
Todd does not ask. Some of it might be due to generating population
growth, but that can\'t be a full explanation. It seems unlikely to be
due to people especially enjoying it, as it has the highest suicide rate
of any family system.

Why is Cuba, with its apparently Western culture, the sole country in
the New World that\'s fertile for Communism? Todd doesn\'t have direct
evidence of Cuba\'s family system, yet he maintains it\'s an exogamous
community system. After some hand-wavy talk of other sources of Cuban
culture, he pieces together hints from the suicide rate and census data.
The census data does suggest that married children have some tendency to
live with parents (but is that due to a [housing
shortage](https://www.everyculture.com/Middle-America-Caribbean/Cubans-Kinship-Marriage-and-Family.html)
more than to culture?). The suicide rate provides some sort of evidence,
but there\'s a lot of noise in that signal. He apparently provides more
evidence in his [2011
book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36139444-l-origine-des-syst-mes-familiaux)
(French only), according to [this
paper](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2511173), and
his [2019
book](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/11/emmanuel-todd-lineages-of-modernity.html).

### Authoritarian

This system is unequal, and intermediate between nuclear and community:
the only child to remain with his parents after marriage is the son who
is the primary heir.

The exogamous and endogamous versions are apparently not worth
distinguishing. The endogamous version seems uncommon - maybe it\'s only
found in [non Ashkenazi
Jews](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin_marriage_in_the_Middle_East#Jews)?

These isolationist cultures resist assimilation more than do most other
family systems. That produces fairly small, homogeneous countries, or
fragmented groups. Examples are Germany, Sweden, Japan, Korea, Scotland,
Catalans, and Jewish culture.

### Egalitarian Nuclear

This system is exogamous, non-authoritarian, and universalist. It
includes nearly all of the Catholic regions of Europe and South America.

### Absolute Nuclear

This system is non-authoritarian, exogamous, and weakly unequal. It\'s
weakly isolationist. It\'s fairly similar to the Egalitarian Nuclear
type.

It\'s found in Anglo-Saxon countries, Holland, and, surprisingly,
Denmark is in this category, in spite of the cultural features it shares
with Sweden.

Where did he get the label \"absolute\" from? I\'ll suggest replacing it
with libertarian.

### Endogamous Community

This is found mainly in the Muslim parts of the region that extends from
northern Africa to the western tips of India and China. It\'s equal and
universalist.

Its strict religious rules about inheritance result in unusually weak
parental authority. Todd considers it authoritarian, but in a sense
that\'s very alien to the European understanding of that word. Authority
in this case is embodied in custom and in the Koran, not in humans or
human-designed organizations.

It has unusually good fraternal bonds, and low tension within the
family. Suicide rates ~~are~~
[were](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-rates-by-country?country=NGA~BRA~JPN~USA~RUS~SWE~GBR~IRN~EGY~SAU~KWT)
less than 1/20 of the European average, and illegitimate births are
rare.

[Henrich
mentioned](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYJ6RvS9zJ3WrGP7o/book-review-weirdest-people)
that Protestant culture caused an increase in suicide rates compared to
Catholic culture, due to trade-offs that made it more likely to produce
a Tesla or a Google, at the cost of making people lonelier. Todd implies
that the exogamous community system is further in the direction of less
loneliness, likely at a cost of less innovation.

The split between Christianity and Islam was due, according to Todd, to
differences over exogamy. Christianity became more hostile to cousin
marriage due to increasing influence of northern regions that more
strongly opposed cousin marriage. Islam imposed some incest restrictions
on cultures that had none, but tolerated incest more than did
Christianity, so it was more welcome in regions that were committed to
cousin marriage. Islam was also sometimes tolerated by the next two
categories of family systems, although they don\'t fully accept all of
the Koran\'s rules.

> Arab socialism is a unique attempt to build socialism without the
> state, or to be more precise and less derisive, an effort to construct
> socialism in a culture without any special aptitude or a tradition of
> centralized, bureaucratic administration.

Endogamous systems in general reject state authority. Todd attributes
this to their reluctance to create bonds of kinship with strangers.
Whereas the exogamous systems provide a role model for creating a strong
relationship with non-kin. This reasoning sounds suspect to me. I prefer
Henrich\'s way of reaching a similar result.

> History is made by individuals in nuclear family countries, by the
> government (a parental symbol) in authoritarian systems. It is defined
> by custom and thus eliminated in the case of endogamous
> anthropological systems. Islam\'s historical passivity can be seen to
> derive from its fundamental anthropological mechanism.

> The Muslim father is too easy-going to be hated or rejected, either in
> human or divine form. The Islamic god is too forgiving for anyone to
> want to annihilate him.

### Asymmetric Community

This system is endogamous, with marriage encouraged between children of
a brother and a sister, but with a prohibition on marriage between
children of two brothers, or children of two sisters.

It\'s found mostly in southern India.

It\'s egalitarian in the narrow sense of equality between brothers, but
it supports large inequalities outside of the family (e.g. the caste
system). This seems to weaken Todd\'s message elsewhere that equality
within the family tends to generate egalitarian political forces.

Some unusual variants of this family system support a form of communism
that\'s more laid-back than we expect from communism (Stalinists,
Maoists, and sometimes Trotskyites cooperate well).

They are found in Sri Lanka and the Indian state of
[Kerala](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala). These variants are
distinguished by polyandry being common, often with brothers sharing a
wife. They\'re either matrilineal, or intermediate between matrilineal
and patrilineal.

### Anomic

Todd calls this a \"faulty nuclear\" system, with few rules, or rules
that are often ignored. It has some overlap with the Absolute Nuclear
family, but it oscillates between communitarianism and mild
individualism.

It\'s seen in parts of southeastern Asia, some indigenous South American
cultures, the Incan empire, ancient Egypt.

It tends to produce strong village solidarity.

It often produces strong but informal grouping by class, with marriage
being mostly within a class. The topmost class looks powerful, and
commands slaves to build displays of power such as pyramids. Yet the
lack of discipline means that power is fragile, and easily destroyed by
outside forces.

It fits well with the ambiguous deity of Buddhism.

Todd makes some weird claims about the massacre of Indonesian communists
in 1965-6: it was substantially a grass-roots uprising, partly from
within the communist movement, and eliminated communism, even in regions
where communists had gotten a majority of the votes. That fits with
Todd\'s claims that this family system is undisciplined and
anti-authoritarian, unwilling to attach strongly to an ideology. But
it\'s moderately inconsistent with [Wikipedia\'s
account](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366).

### African / Unstable

Sub-Saharan Africa is noted for systems with shorter-duration polygynous
marriages. Todd hints at a lot of diversity within these regions, but
documents little of it.

Islam has had difficulty penetrating these regions because its strict
taboo on inheriting wives conflicts with a standard feature of these
family systems.

### Conflicts with Henrich?

I found this book via Policy Tensor, which [points to some
tension](https://policytensor.substack.com/p/the-churchs-crusade-against-cousin)
between Henrich\'s [The WEIRDest
People](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kYJ6RvS9zJ3WrGP7o/book-review-weirdest-people)
and Todd\'s belief that family structures are very hard to change.
Actually, Policy Tensor claims to have evidence that Henrich is flat out
wrong, but Policy Tensor presents way too little evidence to justify
that claim.

I see [some
hints](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2511173) that
Todd\'s 2011 book has more detail on the early history of family
systems, possibly with clear evidence against Henrich.

Todd tells us that when there\'s a change in what family structure
dominates a region, it\'s mostly due to a subpopulation becoming more
dominant. It\'s not too hard to imagine that some of Europe\'s
increasing prohibitions on cousin marriage under the early Christian
church were due to increased influence from northern cultures, which
apparently were more firmly against cousin marriage than the
southernmost European cultures. And most of the correlations that
Henrich reports could have been due to pre-existing local and regional
cultures influencing what religious doctrines were accepted, rather than
religions altering the culture.

I don\'t see much evidence on whether family systems are too persistent
for Henrich\'s claims of Christianity causing exogamy to be plausible.
Todd wants us to assume that family systems persist over many centuries,
but he also notes that they do sometimes change, e.g. that urbanization
erodes community and authoritarian systems.

The most important conflict I see between Henrich and Todd is that
Henrich describes the marital rules for Christianity as a whole,
seemingly taking it for granted that European Christianity had a fairly
uniform culture at any one time. Whereas Todd wants us to assume that
cultural change in Rome would tell us almost nothing about changes in
London, and that we should presume (in the absence of clear evidence)
that London\'s culture was mostly a continuation of its pre-Christian
culture. Henrich tests many different hypotheses about what might cause
the correlation between culture and exposure to Christianity, but he
seems biased towards hypotheses for which he found good data, and he
likely didn\'t find much data for the geographical distribution of
culture circa 500 CE.

Henrich and Todd agree on a number of important points that others
neglect. Henrich still looks mostly right, but there\'s plenty of
complexity that he\'s sweeping under the rug. Henrich overstates the
effect of the church on culture, and overstates the novelty of WEIRD
culture.

Here\'s Todd partly supporting Henrich:

> Developed in France and England, the individualist model was offered
> to the world. \... In the middle ages, the individual did not exist.
> He emerged in the West during the Reformation and the French
> Revolution.

Both authors seem to agree that different systems are good at achieving
different goals. They\'d mostly say that Muslim culture in the year 1500
looked more successful than British culture of the time, and that was
partly due to the strengths of the endogamous family system. They\'d
also agree that modest changes after 1500 in British culture brought out
the strengths of the exogamous nuclear families. So it\'s a bit
confusing to try to classify cousin marriage as a sign of a backwards or
an advanced culture.

Both authors agree that culture mostly changes via evolutionary forces,
although they likely disagree on particular exceptions:

> But the family, varied in its forms, is not itself determined by any
> necessity, logic or rationale. It simply exists, in its diversity, and
> lasts for centuries or millennia. \... It reproduces itself
> identically, from generation to generation, the unconscious imitation
> of parents by their children is enough to ensure the perpetuation of
> anthropological systems. \... It is a blind, irrational mechanism, but
> its power derives precisely from its lack of consciousness \...
> Furthermore, it is completely independent of its economic and
> ecological environments.

### Evaluating predictions

With many books, I check for mistakes by following references. I didn\'t
try that here, partly because he rarely connects specific claims to
specific sources. Instead, enough time has passed that it\'s appropriate
to judge him based on well-known changes since the book was published.

##### 1.

Where would communism spread or recede?

Todd sounded pretty confident that communism would not spread further in
the New World, and his reasoning also applies to most non-communist
states other than Finland, with a bit of uncertainty about Italy and
India.

It may be hard for many of you to recall, but in 1983 many people were
concerned about the trend of expanding communism, and few people were
forecasting a collapse of communism in anything other than vague and
distant timelines.

Todd firmly predicted that Ethiopia would resist Soviet attempts to turn
it communist. He wrote at a time when that prediction [bucked a
moderately clear
trend](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopia%E2%80%93Russia_relations#1978%E2%80%931985).
Soviet influence seems to have peaked about when the book was published,
and in about 4 years Ethiopia started a clear move away from communism.

Todd\'s thesis suggests that communism was more likely to be rejected in
places where communism was imposed by force on a family system that
doesn\'t support it:

-   [Poland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_People%27s_Republic)
-   [Romania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Republic_of_Romania)
-   North Korea
-   Cambodia
-   Laos
-   the six [Muslim Soviet
    republics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_Soviet_Union)

I see no clear evidence that these places rejected communism more than
did those with exogamous community families, so I count this as a failed
implied prediction.

Todd predicted further decline in the French communist party, and it
[looks like that
happened](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_French_Communist_Party).

Some of this might be due to his prediction (made elsewhere) that the
Soviet Union would collapse, which doesn\'t seem to directly follow from
the claims in the book.

##### 2.

Given Todd\'s ideas, it becomes painfully obvious that that the US
attempt at installing a Western-style government in Iraq would
thoroughly fail.

An influential political faction thought that the US could accomplish in
Iraq something like what it did with Germany and Japan after WWII. Those
two countries looked different enough culturally to provide what looked
like medium-quality evidence that Western-style governments could be
imposed in many countries.

Had that faction believed Todd, they\'d have known that their evidence
only covered one type of family structure, and that the difference
between exogamous and endogamous marriage practices would make an
enormous difference. I\'m referring not just to details such as the
willingness of Iraqis to accept democracy, but more basic issues like
their reluctance to respect features such as nations, or civil
authority.

##### 3.

\"Assassinating the president is almost a custom in North America.\" - I
guessed that this was clearly discredited by the absence of
assassination attempts after 1981, but Wikipedia [lists enough
attempts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots)
that I have to admit there\'s some truth to Todd\'s claim.

##### 4.

Todd\'s beliefs imply some predictions about which European countries
are likely to have the most conflict with Muslim immigrants. E.g. the
book led me to expect more tension in Germany and Sweden than in Poland
and Spain. Tables 2 to 5 of [this
report](https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/156-Manifestations_EN.pdf)
mostly confirm that prediction, but [this survey of
attitudes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Europe#Attitudes_towards_Muslims)
shows the opposite pattern. So I\'m confused as to whether there\'s a
stable pattern.

##### 5.

I recommend [Testing Todd: family types and
development](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/testing-todd-family-types-and-development/08591ED67D7CBF6B79F0A06A2659C20D),
which provides mixed evidence on some of the book\'s claims. But note
that some of the hypotheses which that paper attributes to Todd don\'t
match my understanding of the book\'s claims.

-   Todd says the endogamous community family is anti-racist, yet this
    paper reports it as the most racist family system, while claiming
    the racism data support Todd\'s view.
-   The paper shows that authoritarian family system has greater rule of
    law than other systems, and claims that conflicts with Todd\'s
    position. That seems to require a bizarre misunderstanding. I count
    this as clearly confirming Todd.
-   I\'m confused as to whether they use an appropriate measure of
    innovation - they find that authoritarian family systems are more
    innovative than nuclear family systems, which looks suspicious to
    me.

##### 6.

In sum, his predictions were clearly better than what a random pundit of
the time would have made, but not good enough that I\'d bet much money
on his beliefs.

### Conclusion

This is one of the rare books that is shorter than I wanted.

The book\'s claims are unlikely to be more than 60% correct, but
they\'re still quite valuable for focusing attention on topics which are
both important and neglected. Whenever I try to understand differences
between cultures, I\'ll remember to ask whether family structures
explain patterns, and I\'ll likely often decide it\'s hard to tell.

I\'ve become frustrated at how little attention sources such as
Wikipedia pay to what I now see as the most important features of a
culture.

I\'m pretty sure that the patterns that he describes are much more than
mere coincidences, but I don\'t trust his guesses about the causal
mechanisms.

PS. - Parts of the book are much too Freudian for me. E.g. a section on
witch-hunts (which happen mainly in authoritarian family societies) is
titled \"Killing the mother\".