The New York Times’s Opinionator page has a wonderful blog called Borderlines, which is about maps. The posts are all by map-lover and connoisseur Frank Jacobs, who also has a blog called Strange Maps: Cartographic Curiosities. I’m a lifelong map aficionado, so am bound to like blogs like these. The Borderlines post today is about the invisible borders of family types in Europe. Observing the existence of numerous invisible cultural borders—e.g. linguistic, culinary—, Jacobs writes that
some cultural categories are more persistent than the fading diversity of language. Research conducted in 2007 paints a pretty strange, and surprisingly tenacious, set of borders across Western Europe. Its subject? “An often overlooked institution, the family”: some academics had “noted strong patterns of family structure, with clear regional variations and persistence over time and linked them to significant social and economic outcomes.”
The research considered family types based on two criteria. One, the relationship between parents and children. If children flee the nest at an early age, the family type can be said to be “liberal.” If they stay at home and under the authority of their parents long into adulthood, even after having married themselves, the relationship can be classified as “authoritarian.” Second criterion: the relationship among siblings. If they are treated equally (in inheritance law, for example), the relationship is classified as “equal,” but if one child is favored (the firstborn son, say), the relationship is “unequal.”
He then proceeds to enumerate the five distinct family types in Europe. This sounded very familiar to me, as I had read all about it back in the ’90s, in the work of French social scientist and public intellectual Emmanuel Todd, who pioneered the typology. Todd began his research on the question in the early 1980s—as described in the single volume reprint of his two main books on it—, after having been struck by the near perfect coincidence between parts of Europe where the Communist party was electorally strong and a particular type of peasant family structure, that was both authoritarian and egalitarian. Todd advanced the hypothesis of a necessary link between the anthropological basis of a society and its ideological superstructure. The typology of family systems he developed—integrating the level of authoritarianism in the parent-child relationship, the degree of equality in the relationship between brothers, matrimonial exchange and the status of women—enabled him to explain the diversity of ideological and economic destinies in Europe—and then the whole world—, both between societies and within them.
Todd was advancing an overarching structural argument to Explain the world, in the same way as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and all sorts of mega-works on the economy. I thought it was a fascinating argument—and which I discussed at length at the time with one academic friend (no one else I knew was familiar with Todd’s work)—though didn’t know what to make of it. Though compelling it did seem a little deterministic and I wondered about the accuracy of Todd’s descriptions of the family structures of countries other than France, which were mainly based on secondary sources. Also, the English translations of his books on the subject (published by Blackwell, long out-of-print) received mixed reviews in the relevant academic journals (in sociology, anthropology, and history; I read them all). Most of the reviewers were skeptical of Todd’s mega-claims, though none outright rubbished his argument so far as I remember. Todd’s a big wheel in France but non-French scholars pay little attention to him (and despite his doctorate from Cambridge), so he isn’t well-known in Anglo-American academia (and I don’t think in most of Europe either). His public intellectual side irritated as well—irritated me, at least—, with his sometimes flaky political views (generally left souverainiste) and obsessions, and shoot-from-the-hip media punditry. Todd is smart but a nut, when not a crank.
But now I see that Todd’s arguments on family structure do indeed underpin Frank Jacobs’s post, which is based on an academic paper he cites by Gilles Duranton, Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, and Richard Sandall (economists and geographers in Canada and the UK), published by the College of Europe in Bruges. The paper
examines the association between one of the most basic institutional forms, the family, and a series of demographic, educational, social, and economic indicators across regions in Europe. Using Emmanuel Todd’s classification of medieval European family systems, we identify potential links between family types and regional disparities in household size, educational attainment, social capital, labour participation, sectoral structure, wealth, and inequality. The results indicate that medieval family structures seem to have influenced European regional disparities in virtually every indicator considered. That these links remain, despite the influence of the modern state and population migration, suggests that either such structures are extremely resilient or else they have in the past been internalised within other social and economic institutions as they developed.
So it looks like Emmanuel Todd may have been on to something after all. The PDF of the paper is here.
Arun with a View 
I read parts of Todd’s book a few years ago and thought it was very interesting and it felt intuitively true based on my experiences and what I know about my family here in France (origins in the North and Southwest). But I was disappointed by his other books one of which still sits in my bookshelf, Après l’empire. I thought he made some good points but was a bit over the top. This did not encourage me to read further but I think I will try to get a copy of La Diversité and retrace his argument and see what I think of it now.
We look to be on the same page here, Victoria. Todd’s Après la guerre was a best-seller but, after reading the reviews – and notably one by Elie Cohen –, I decided to take a pass on it, as I knew it would aggravate me. Todd appeared to be overreaching intellectually with this one, writing on subjects in which he had no particular competence and with his usual peremptory assertions. That someone like Todd should take on the likes of Paul Krugman on the subject of international trade theory was both the height of chutzpah and a joke. I rather doubt Krugman even took notice.
But Todd’s work on family structure is interesting and, in the case of France at least, does seem intuitively true, as you say.
Quick comment, in three times. First, what people tend to know from Todd is the sometimes whacky political commentator and his “formules” (the man of the “fracture sociale”). A pity, because Todd is interesting in a non-conformist way. What he wrote on european identity and immigration, for instance, is food for thought. Second, his main default is to think all problems through a demographic lense. That does not always work, and it is quite one-sided. Third, Todd published with youssef courbage a very good book on demography and politics in northern africa and the middle east: le carrefour des civilisations. Good stuff, well worth reading.
And now: back to the beach!
Sorry about the double post. The book by Todd and Courbage on middle-eastern and northern African demographics is “Le rendez-vous des civilisations”, not “le carrefour”… Mea culpa. You will find a book review here, summarizing the main argument:
http://www.cairn.info/revue-confluences-mediterranee-2008-1-page-184.htm
Louis, you’re on target in labeling some of Todd’s political commentary “wacky”. He was particularly unhinged about Sarkozy, whom he equated with Jean-Marie Le Pen. And then there’s his voting for the PCF in past elections, though he is no communist himself. I also agree with you on Todd’s monocausal explanation of societies through the sole demographic lens. His family type models are interesting but too rigid and deterministic. And as it just so happens, his family type model enables him to situate universality in the Ile-de-France. Paris – not France, but specifically Paris and its immediate hinterland – is the epitome of what is societally good in this world, and because of its demographic DNA is destined to remain that way. No wonder Todd won a big award of the French National Assembly for his book Le Destin des immigrés. Among Parisian intellectuals he is second to none in flattering the national amour-propre.
I have not read his book with Youssef Courbage on the Middle East-North Africa but am familiar with the argument, which was developed in more detail – and no doubt with more supporting documentation – by the demographer Philippe Fargues in his Générations Arabes : L’Alchimie du nombre (Fayard, 2000). I also suspect that Courbages did the empirical legwork for the book, with Todd contributing his one-size-fits-all model. But I’ll give it a read at some point.