René Girard

About the author

René Girard (1923–2015) was a French thinker whose mimetic theory reshaped how scholars understand desire, violence, and culture. Born in Avignon, he built his career in American literature departments while pursuing relentlessly interdisciplinary work: his argument that human desire is fundamentally imitative, generating rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism at the roots of religion and society, influenced fields from theology to economics to psychology. First sketched in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), the theory reached its fullest expression in his magnum opus Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978).

In 2005, he was elected to the Académie Française.