René Girard and Political Philosophy

More people live under democratic governments than ever before, in a state of relative `freedom’. But the majority of us pursue goals, goods and desires defined by others. And so our era of greatest political freedom, in conjunction with free markets and consumerism, has unleashed the greatest frenzy of imitation. From Plato to Rawls, political thinkers assumed that we have sufficient rational power and freedom to resolve the conflicts posed by our highly social yet volatile human nature. René Girard thinks otherwise. René Girard and Political Philosophy brings Girard's evolutionarily informed and apocalyptic thought into confrontation with the key thinkers of the Western tradition of political philosophy and in doing so rewrites the history of political philosophy in light of mimetic theory and its more recent connection to evolutionary thought. This book expands Girard scholarship, emphasizing the relevance of evolutionary theory to political philosophy, and articulating a new understanding of Girard, politics and political philosophy. Kent Enns' line of interpretation produces not only a mimetic reading of key political thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Nozick, Aristotle, Hume and Hayek, but also the case for reassessing the entire tradition, presenting the idea of a mimetic political philosophy.