Tzvetan Todorov

By Roger Berkowitz

Tzvetan Todorov is one of those rare authors whose work could be surprising and moving. When I was in graduate school, his book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other was one of the texts my colleagues and I wrestled with. More recently, his book Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps showed that even in the most extreme and harrowing conditions, human beings can and often did make moral choices that demonstrated courage and dignity. Todorov died this week. Sewell Chan remembers him in an obituary. 

His 1989 book “On Human Diversity” looked at how French authors have approached “the other,” and it made the case for both universal values and respect for diverse cultures.

“He helped me look at the world in a different way, to step outside the frame of ‘them and us’ that was always being built,” Rony Brauman, a former president of Doctors Without Borders in France and a longtime friend, said in a phone interview. “He had such a remarkable open mind, always looking beyond appearances, refusing to be hypnotized even by great evil, but searching for empathy. In his writing and in person, there was always that impressive capacity for kindness and good will.”

Mr. Todorov’s book “Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps” (1996) took note of the paradox that human decency and goodness exist even in the most evil situations. The volume was “a tribute to the small number of ‘just’ men and women who showed both courage and generosity,” the political scientist Stanley Hoffmann, who died in 2015, wrote in a review in the magazine Foreign Affairs.