How French Thinker René Girard Became A MAGA Muse

PARIS — Two years after Girard’s ashes were transferred to the family vault, this operation will complete the homecoming of a French thinker who spent his entire life across in the United States, and whose influence continues to resonate in there: Vice President JD Vance cites him, and billionaire Peter Thiel, a supporter of Donald Trump and a leading figure in American national conservatism, claims his intellectual legacy.

Has the anthropologist, best known for the scapegoating mechanism and the mimetic theory of desire, become the new philosophical reference for the American right? The question irritates and divides those in Girardian circles. Back in September, French socio-economist Bernard Perret published an article in the journal Esprit “against the co-opting of René Girard by the American right.”

Since then, commentary has flourished, denouncing a “Trump camp takeover” here, an act of “poaching” there, or a “gross distortion of his thought” by MAGA intellectuals. It’s relatively rare for the writings of a French thinker to break into the upper echelons of power. And the passionate debate this provokes raises several questions: If the aim is to instrumentalize him, what’s the point of quoting a philosopher? And above all, what exactly are American conservatives looking for in Girard?

Mimetic rivalry and competition

The relationship between Peter Thiel and René Girard is first and foremost a personal one. “I met him when I was a student at Stanford in the late 1980s. I attended one of his classes during my senior year, and then got to know him very well over the next 20 years,” recalls Thiel, who has since become a billionaire.

Fascinated by the professor, Thiel quickly dedicated part of his fortune to promoting Girard’s work. In 2008, he founded Imitatio, a philanthropic fund whose goal is to support Girardian studies and research on mimetic desire across disciplines. After Girard’s death, Thiel even spoke at the Stanford campus memorial, alongside Jean-Pierre Dupuy and Girard’s son, Martin.

For Girard, human desires are not inherent to individuals — they are based on imitation.

The first aspect of Girard’s thinking that captivated Thiel was his mimetic theory of desire. For Girard, human desires are not inherent to individuals — they are based on imitation. This theory, originally literary, is laid out in Deceit, Desire and the Novel , published in 1961: From Don Quixote to Madame Bovary, characters shape their desires based on those of others.

Mimetic desire, for Girard, is a constant of human nature; it is both a source of violence (as people fight over the same things) and a driver of the evolution of human wants.

What lessons might an investor like Thiel draw from this? Some see his funding of Facebook as a cynical application of mimetic theory: Social media creates global competition and replicates desires on a mass scale. If a business model taps into a basic mechanism of human anthropology, it’s bound to succeed.

But the Trump donor also recognizes the limits of mimeticism. In his 2014 bestselling book on investing and startups, Zero to One , he stresses the futility of imitation in entrepreneurship: “If you’re copying these guys, you have nothing new to offer.” Thiel even derives a total aversion to competition from this: Rather than imitating their rivals, businesses should strive for monopoly in their own distinct fields.

Spreading the gospel

It would be reductive, however, to think Thiel applies Girard’s ideas only economically. He’s read him deeply and sincerely and believes he is one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. “Nietzsche lived in the 19th century and was very important for the 20th, I wonder if Girard was this 20th-century thinker who will be very important in the 21st. It will just take some time,” he said in the 2023 documentary Things Hidden: The Life and Legacy of René Girard .

Everywhere he goes, Thiel spreads the word. Like during a lecture at Yale University in 2011. In the audience sat JD Vance. Then a young law student, he was captivated by the investor’s speech. “Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School” Vance would write in 2020 in The Lamp Magazine .

He argued that we were increasingly tracked into cutthroat professional competitions…We would compete for jobs at elite law firms…At each juncture, he said, our jobs would offer longer work hours, social alienation from our peers, and work whose prestige would fail to make up for its meaninglessness.” That, Vance wrote, was his introduction to René Girard’s thinking: “His theory of mimetic rivalry — that we tend to compete over the things that other people want — spoke directly to some of the pressures I experienced at Yale.”

From an analysis of lawyers’ mimetic rivalries to a critique of East Coast elites, it was only a short step for Vance. After working two years as a lawyer, he moved to San Francisco, where Thiel hired him to run his firm Mithril Capital, then backed his 2022 Senate campaign with €15 million. The two men formed a genuine friendship.

In the French thinker, Vance says he found a way to reconcile faith and reason.

In the 2020 article, Vance praised his mentor, writing that “he was possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, but he was also a Christian. He defied the social template I had constructed — that dumb people were Christians and smart ones atheists. I began to wonder where his religious belief came from, which led me to René Girard, the French philosopher whom he apparently studied under at Stanford.”

René Girard and Saint Augustine

Alongside Saint Augustine, Girard became one of the key thinkers that led Vance — raised in an evangelical family — to convert to Catholicism. In the French thinker, Vance says he found a way to reconcile faith and reason. This is best understood through what Girard called an “anthropological defense of Christianity,” laid out in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (1999), which he described as “ultimately a defense of Christianity.” For Girard, the Gospels reveal a truth about human beings.

To briefly summarize the idea: All societies have historically escaped violence by designating a scapegoat, uniting the community against them. While Christ is also a scapegoat, he differs fundamentally from those in ancient myths. How? Because he shows, by his example, that the victim is innocent, and that the cause of violence lies not in him, but in those who kill him. “In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim,” Vance writes in The Lamp .

In other words, Christ’s death revealed the underlying mechanics of scapegoating and made them obsolete. The act of scapegoating can only bring “peace” to society if it remains unconscious — and after Jesus, it no longer can. In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2001), Girard argues that the entire theory of mimetic desire and the sacred is contained within the Gospels, which convey a truth about humanity that calls us to nonviolence.

“Things Hidden was electrifying,” Thiel recalls in an interview. “It felt like you understood the meaning of history, the key to history, God’s plan for history. There was a set of insights that nobody else on this planet had that gave a lot of the Girardian group a lot of energy in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Apocalypse

This apologetic reading of Girard’s work first caught the attention of theologians, some of whom helped found the Colloquium on Violence and Religion in 1991. It continues to host annual gatherings of academics and clergy to discuss Girard’s legacy. Thiel financially supports the project and participates in its roundtables. In June 2023, he even engaged in discussion with Frédéric Worms, director of the École Normale Supérieure.

“Based solely on the exchange I had with him, Peter Thiel had a serious and informed reading of Girard,” Worms told Le Figaro. “But he then makes a personal interpretation that goes in another direction.”

That “other direction” is Thiel’s fixation on apocalypse — an idea he draws from Girard and seeks to expand in his own writings. “Peter Thiel is committed to the idea of violence culminating in a great apocalypse, but that’s precisely what I resist,” Worms insists.

When it comes to drawing political conclusions from this theory, things get a little trickier.

Here, the billionaire draws on Girard’s idea that the Revelation deprived human societies of the scapegoat as a recourse in the face of violence: Even if we have countless little scapegoatings here and there, we are not going to create a new scapegoat god in the sense of Greek religion and so forth. Impossible. We are too Christian for that…We are deprived of all medicine against our own violence. Therefore, we are moving towards destruction,” Girard says in the documentary Things Hidden.

Acting as a Christian in the city

But when it comes to drawing political conclusions from this theory, things get a little trickier. For Girard, the way to escape the cycle of violence without scapegoating is to act like a Christian. Thiel deduces from this that we should prefer “the Christianity of Constantine to that of Mother Theresa,” i.e. a political, even statist, Christianity that does not take refuge in impotence. This statement aroused the ire of some Girardians, including theologian Wolfgang Palaver, who wrote an article titled “On the Dangers of a Return to Constantinianism.”

Indeed, Girard believes in the importance of acting as a Christian in the city, but as he says himself: “It’s not a political program, as the 19th century believed. It’s not a social program. It’s if the mimetic escalation begins, this is the moment you must drop everything. Either we are going to love each other, or we’re going to die.

In many ways, Girardian thought is more suited to conservatives than progressives: pessimism about human nature, distrust of revolutions, the importance of the stabilizing force of tradition, criticism of modernity and relativism — he even signed a petition in Le Figaro in favor of the Tridentine Mass. But the complexity and subtlety of his theories are far removed from Trumpist brutality.

Especially as “René Girard never moved in American conservative political circles,” points out his biographer and friend Benoît Chantre, who is president of the Mimetic Research Association. “His thinking is by definition non-reactionary. For him, there’s no going back to a previous model. That is both the danger and the strength of modernity.”

His anthropological and literary work can therefore hardly be reduced to a political reading. For his great-niece Marie Girard, president of the Société des amis de Joseph et René Girard, “it’s like applying the Gospel to politics: People have been trying for two thousand years, and no one has succeeded.”