If you're always imitating others or aspiring to be something else, what's left of the "authentic" you? According to the French philosopher René Girard, not much: Nothing can be truly authentic, he argued--everything comes from somewhere else. This is just one of the many original and counterintuitive claims put forth in Girard's sweeping approach to human history. He argues it is sameness, not our difference that leads to conflict, and he sees religion as a way to contain the chaos as opposed to its first cause. Listen as Stanford University scholar Cynthia Haven speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about Girard's theories of desire and violence. The conversation also includes a discussion of the power of forgiveness to put a stop to conflict's rinse-and-repeat.
Welcome to Econ talk conversations for the curious part of the Library of economics and Liberty.
I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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Today is May 28, 2024, and my guest is author Cynthia Haven of Stanford University.
She is a national endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
Among other books, she is the author of Evolution of a Life of Rene Girard, which was the first biography of the french theorist published in 2018.
And she is the editor of Rene Girard's all Desire is a desire for being essential writings, which was published in 2023.
Cynthia, welcome to Econ Talk.
Pleasure to be here.
Our topic for today is Rene Girard and his ideas.
We have a previous episode on Girard with Jonathan Bee that we'll link to, but I want to start with a bit about Girard's life.
He was born in 1923.
He died in 2015.
What was his career?
Where was he?
What was he writing about?
He's not a normal scholar with a narrow discipline, and he had a very unusual academic life.