Books by Tzvetan Todorov

The Conquest of America is a fascinating study of cultural confrontation in the New World, with implications far beyond sixteenth-century America. The book offers an original interpretation of the Spaniards' conquest, colonization, and destruction of pre-Columbian cultures in Mexico and the Caribbean.

Drawing on history, anthropology, and politics, and bringing to bear examples ranging from the murder of Theo van Gogh to the French ban on headscarves, this book argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect.

Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self. Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu, and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self, morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act according to our will while connecting the well-being of other members with our own. It is through this understanding of free will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and personal integrity. Placing the history of ideas at the service of a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.

Recounts the author's own experiences with totalitarianism in his native Bulgaria, offering a historical look at communism. This title reveals the essence of totalitarian ideology, the characteristics of daily life under communism, and the irony of democratic messianism.

This is a collection in translation of recent essays by Tzvelan Todorov, one of the most eminent of today's literary critics. Todorov proposes definitions for the notions of literature, discourse and genre, discusses the two principal literary genres, fiction and poetry, and examines individual authors as case studies.

A landmark new account of the twentieth century from one of Europe's most outstanding thinkers.