Girard
07 Jan 2026 - 07 Jan 2026
Claude
- René Girard isn't typically classified as a "conflict theorist" in the conventional sociological sense—that label usually refers to the Marxist-Weberian tradition focused on class struggle and competing group interests (Dahrendorf, C. Wright Mills, etc.).
- That said, conflict is absolutely central to Girard's thought, just theorized very differently. His mimetic theory makes rivalry and violence generative of culture itself:
- Mimetic desire produces inevitable conflict as people converge on the same objects
- The escalating "mimetic crisis" threatens to tear communities apart
- The scapegoat mechanism resolves this through collective violence against a surrogate victim
- Religion, prohibition, and ritual emerge to manage and contain this fundamental violence
- So while Marx sees conflict arising from material conditions and structural contradictions, Girard locates it in the very structure of desire itself—it's anthropological and quasi-metaphysical rather than economic or political.
- There's an interesting comparison to be made: both thinkers see conflict as foundational rather than aberrational, and both offer "hermeneutics of suspicion" that unmask hidden violence beneath social order. But Girard's resolution points toward religious revelation (specifically the Gospels exposing the scapegoat mechanism) rather than revolutionary praxis.
- If anything, Girard might be called a violence theorist—someone for whom violence is the hidden engine of the sacred and social order, requiring exposure rather than dialectical resolution. His intellectual lineage runs more through Durkheim, Freud, and literary criticism than through Marx.