René Girard’s reputation has been growing since his death, in 2015. He was the subject of a 2018 biography, and a collection of his writings was published last month by Penguin Classics.

The Oracle of Silicon Valley

A posthumous essay collection makes clear that the French philosopher René Girard foresaw 21st-century culture—and tried to warn us

By Matthew Gasda

We are all Girardians now—whether we know it or not. The concepts minted in the early 1960s by the late French literary critic and philosopher René Girard explain the pathologies of the smartphone age as elegantly as Freud’s explained bourgeois neuroses at the turn of the last century.

While Freud was renowned in his own time, Girard, who died in 2015, is still far from a household name. A distinguished scholar and the author of nearly 30 books, he never broke through to a mass audience like his contemporary Harold Bloom, who transitioned from high theory to cultural critiques in the 1990s. Girard was not a public intellectual; he was a quietly influential, if recondite, academic: the Velvet Underground, not the Beatles.