Person

René Girard

René Girard

French-American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science (1923–2015); a longtime professor at Stanford and member of the Académie française. Girard is best known for mimetic theory — an account of human desire, conflict, and religion that runs from literary criticism through anthropology to a distinctive reading of Christianity, and which has had an outsized influence in Silicon Valley, largely through his student Peter Thiel.

Girard’s argument has three linked moves. First, mimetic desire: we do not want things spontaneously but imitatively — we learn what to want by copying the desires of others (the model), so desire is triangular, not a straight line between subject and object. Second, mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat: because imitation converges many desires on the same objects, it breeds rivalry that escalates toward a war of all against all; archaic societies discharged this crisis by uniting against a single arbitrary victim, the scapegoat, whose killing restored peace and was then remembered as sacred — the hidden origin, in Girard’s telling, of myth, ritual, and sacrifice. Third, the Judeo-Christian revelation: the Gospels replay the scapegoating mechanism but, uniquely, take the victim’s side and expose the mechanism as unjust, draining it of its power to sacralise violence.

In the wiki

  • Peter Thiel on Political Theology — mimetic theory is the analytic backbone of Thiel’s conversation with Tyler Cowen. Thiel (who studied under Girard at Stanford) applies scapegoating and mimetic rivalry to Calvinism, the Old Testament, Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy politics, Shakespeare, and his own biography, folding Girard into a broader Political Theology frame in which modern secular politics still runs on disguised scapegoating.
  • Girardian reading also surfaces, by contrast, in the Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English discussion, where the argument runs against a Girardian interpretation of the play’s substitutions — a useful counterpoint to Thiel’s enthusiastic use.

See also