About the book
A conversation with two psychiatrists, Guy Lefort and Jean-Michel Oughourlian, carries the fullest account of Rene Girard's thinking up to that point. His starting idea is mimesis: rivals imitate one another as they try to stand apart, grow ever more alike, and slide toward conflict. At moments of crisis, he argues, early societies restored order by turning together on a single victim, and the memory of that killing, hidden and repeated as ritual sacrifice, became the root of religion. Girard then reads the Judeo-Christian scriptures against this scheme and takes issue with Freud's Totem and Taboo. The title borrows a line from Matthew 13:35.
Peter Thiel said in a podcast interview that Girard is the writer who has shaped him most, calling it his masterwork and saying that, once learned, the idea of imitation as the source of behavior is something one sees every day.
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Peter Thiel (Entrepreneur, Investor)
He’s the one writer who has influenced me the most [...]. Girard gives a sweeping view of the whole human experience on this planet — something captured in the title of his masterwork, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — but it’s not just an academic philosophy. Once you learn about it, his view of imitation as the root of behavior is something you will see every day, not just in people around you but in yourself.
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