Tzvetan Todorov

Tzvetan Todorov is a philosopher and cultural critic and the author of over 20 books. Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, he has lived in France since 1963. He has been particularly influential thorough his work on the legacy of totalitarianism, as in the books Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (Henry Holt,1991) and Hope and Memory (Atlantic Books, 2000). With the publication of Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism (Princeton UP, 2002) he has become widely celebrated as one of the world’s leading humanist philosophers, a reputation that will be enhanced with the publication of In Defence of the Enlightenment (Atlantic books, 2009), a concise and clear-eyed distillation of the Enlightenment principles that should, he argues, guide us today.