Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a profound, but also very challenging text. Girard is trying to do nothing less than create a Copernican revolution that merges historical agency, metaphysics, psychology, and anthropology into a combined construct. ’Things Hidden’ is Girard’s most famous work on Mimetic Theory. Mimetic Theory’s key insight is that human desire is not an autonomous process, but a collective one. We want things because other people want them. As more and more people want something and when that “thing” remains scarce, there is conflict. Most conflict then is not because humans want different things, but because they want the same thing. An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis.

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