René Girard‘s thesis on the function of scapegoats is rooted in his theory of mimetic desire, which suggests that human desires are not innate but imitated from others, leading to rivalry and conflict. As these tensions escalate within a society, they threaten its stability. To resolve this crisis, communities unconsciously select a scapegoat—an individual or group—onto whom they project their collective aggression. By uniting against the scapegoat, society restores order and temporarily alleviates conflict. Over time, this scapegoating process becomes institutionalized in myths, rituals, and religious traditions, reinforcing social cohesion while obscuring the victim’s innocence. Girard’s work challenges traditional views of violence and sacrifice, arguing that many cultural and religious practices originate from this cycle of scapegoating and collective violence.
Hence the first function of scapegoats is the redirection of negative energy that culminates within communities due to the nature of desire being mimetic and associative onto an object that can be collectively defined from the outside. This aspect of Girard’s thesis corresponds with Carl Schmitt’s fundamental conception of a political community as the separation between friends and enemies. Both theses however, presuppose that a community is able to identify itself. What is being defined as an enemy or a scapegoat remains arbitrary, although it is exactly that which enables self-identification in the first place. That is: community presupposes immunity.
Using the works of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, Zygmunt Bauman suggests that which becomes the scapegoat and the enemy is best conceived of as “the stranger”: the one who appears in our midst and does not leave. What makes a stranger is that he or she appears out of context, without a shared history. As a result, the projection of antagonistic desires onto a strange object is not restrained by actual experiences, exactly because we do not know its history and its context. We can simply invent it. The stranger has no identity of his or her own and can therefore help to constitute the necessary opposite of any identity we wish to claim.
The function of the scapegoat is to alleviate conflicts be becoming the object of blame. As Mary Douglas wrote, blaming is a common social response to risk and insecurity, which is a more precise way to understand the threat of conflicts: at risk is the unity of the political community. What Girard’s thesis does not explain is what drives the collective libidal energy of mimetic desires. For this, we need to sociological concept of interests. For sociologists as divergent as Tarde, Simmel, Small, Marx, Elias, Dahrendorf, Bourdieu and Latour, conflicts are always conflicts of interests.
Historical Materialism teaches us that every political community is based on asymmetrical interests: certain groups are better able to pursue their interests than others. Dialectical Historical Materialism teaches us that this is also an association of dependence: the more powerful need to incorporate the interests (and libidinal desires) of the less powerful to sustain their power as a political community. As there is no community without immunity, the stranger performs the necessary function of scapegoat to immunize the political order of asymmetrical interests so that it can function is a community.
Over the last two centuries, this process shaped what we now call nationhood. The immunization of the political community against the stranger has been institutionalized as the nation state. The rituals of performing the identity politics of community (e.g. nationalism) can be found in national holidays, celebrations, anthems, sports events, etc. and their main actors are politicians, journalists and celebrities, who are often mistaken as “the elite”, thereby further obscuring the ones who really benefit the most from the asymmetrical interests that are hidden in every political community.
In traditional religious settings, a scapegoat performed a holy function (appeasing or reuniting with the gods) and thus had something sacred within itself (a major example being Jesus Christ himself). With secularization, however, this scared function has been lost. The scapegoats of modern identity politics are sacrificed in virtual or sometimes even actual holocausts and genocides without being ascribed any transcendental value.
According to Jason W. Moore, the decisive turn in the modus of western culture (that is: how it solves its problems) is that of western imperial colonialism, which allowed the creation of two mythical figures: Man and Nature as opposites, with the second being completely objectified in a relation of subservience to the first.This may also have had a huge impact on the role of religion. it may not be coincidental at all, that the emergence of the imperial-colonial mindset took place at the same time as the Protestant Revolution, which entailed anew allignmetn betwene Church and State as in Western Europe, the emregnet Protestant Churches were often also defined as National Churches (e.g. Anglicanism, the various Dutch Reformist Churches, etc.). The birth of nationhood and the nation state brought two more abstract media between people and their God: the national community and the sovereign law of the state.
The elimination of God from the equation of sacrifice also removed the last check on accountability in relation to sovereign power, which as a result become completely self-referential. The collective and institutional barbarism of modern scapegoat sacrifices thus exceeds manifold that of – for example – medieval Europe, exactly because it is framed within an ethos of legal-rational authority in the name of an abstract political community: the nation-state.
It is perhaps now easier to understand why certain political parties are actively engaged in turning immigrants into scapegoats. They claim to represent the nation as a political community; they identify the unity of this community in terms of national culture. The question every sociologist should ask, however, is which particular interests are embodied in this abstract concept of “national culture”?.
Example 1: We often hear that immigrants are bad for the economy as they are BOTH a burden on the state AND take away the jobs from the native population. Besides this being a contradiction, in both cases the opposite can be shown: Immigrants who receive support from the state for food and shelter are merely passing on money from taxpayers to beneficiaries such as landlord and retailers on top of that, they allow for the creation of many jobs within the government to regulate and control them. Immigrants who are employed EITHER reduce the shortages of labour OR help keep lower costs low (for example in the gig economy); in both cases, it are employers, businesses and consumers that benefit.
Example 2: We often hear that immigrants pose security risks because they are alleged to be thieves, murders and rapists (because of “their culture”). Regardless whether this is statistically speaking valid or not (and there are a lot of reasonable doubts about this), we have to ask the question what it is of being an immigrant – the immigrant-ness so to speak – that makes one more likely to be a criminal? To assume that immigrants are more likely to be thieves, murders and rapists assumes that it is some kind of collective disposition (“culture”) that makes them like this. But those engaged in violent crimes are disproportionally young men across almost all cultures; why not target young men as a problematic category instead, as this is also a collective disposition which seems to exist in almost all cultures?
Looking at both examples, it becomes very quickly apparent, that these claims cannot be identified without reference to the negativity of the scapegoat, that is, there is no community without immunity. Scapegoats are in themselves always-already guilty because they are always-already scapegoats. This self-referentiality is the core of identity thinking.
When we look at the main difference between the two examples, we can learn about more about which interests are made visible and which ones are made invisible. The first example makes it clear that the interests of the beneficiaries – property owners, entrepreneurs and the professional managerial class – remain invisible. It is as if the political parties that scapegoat immigrants do now want us to think about the beneficiaries too much. This is perhaps also, because the vast majority of immigrants entering into Western nations do so completely legally with work permits and visas, because employers need them, because demographically speaking, most western nations suffer from declining birth rates.
Perhaps it is here where we can identify a collusion of interests: the super wealthy need cheap labour, illegalizing immigration will increase illegal immigration and thereby better opportunities for exploitation. At the same time, the actual reduction of immigrant workers will enable states to impose tougher labour laws together with the destruction of social security, reducing the legal protections of workers, also enabling higher rates of exploitation. Finally, identifying declining birth rates as a national problem will allow states to reduce the reproductive rights for women and enhance the re-establishment of patriarchal control over women’s lives. It often is indeed merely a matter of connecting the dots.
The second example makes clear that male aggression as such is being made invisible when violent crime is related to “foreign cultures”. By culturalizing masculine violence, the fundamental structure of patriarchy itself disappears. The very word nation is etymologically connected to birth. It is women who give birth to a nation. National identity relies on securing control over women’s bodies. This explains why all ethno-nationalist and racist notions of political communities insist on unquestionable patriarchal structures with reference to nature and/or religion. This also explains why toxic masculinity is primarily associated with both racist political ideologies and corporatist political economics. It is simply the most visible representation of the structure triangle of capitalism, colonial imperialism and patriarchy.
Having established that the function of scapegoats is not only the unification of an (imagined) political community but also the immunization of that political community against exposing its own conflicts of interests, we can now try to explain why scapegoat politics are doomed to fail.
As the main functions of sacrificing scapegoats are to unify and immunize, this practice directs attention away from the actual underlying conflicts of interests, without solving any of the issues that lead to them. As libidinal desires are mimetically manufactured and distracted from these actual interests – also via rituals, symbols, religion and entertainment – they have to kept in circulation by a continuation of sacrifices. As soon as a scapegoat has been eliminated, a new one will have to be invented. This is for example why the Holocaust in the Third Reich was not limited to the systematic murdering of Jews, a whole host of other scapegoats – Roma and Sinti, Communists, disabled people and gay people – were also subject to scapegoat sacrifices. This is because unlike in – for example – Medieval Europe, the underlying processes of communification and immunification are never saturated (this is the logical of imperial capitalism).
Sacrificing scapegoats does not provide a permanent solution to the problems our ancestors have created and we have perpetuated. Scapegoats are meant to preserve the status quo. But what if instead of inventing scapegoats, we direct our attention to the actual beneficiaries of the constellations of political communities? What if we stop allowing our mimetic desires being manufactured by propaganda and entertainment? What if we stop thinking in terms of collective identities as meaning something substantial? What if we commit ourselves to a sociology based on identifying and analysing interests?
Karl Marx understood this as he appealed to workers of all nations to unite. The problem however turned out to be that his opponents understood all too well, that this would mean the end of bourgeois rule. The creation of national socialism was the answer. Bolstering an idea of social solidarity within the territorial confines of a nation state provided not only an answer to the threat of the collapse of capitalism, it also provided a perfect opportunity for the bourgeoisie to secure the conditions of the reproduction of its own dominance, in particular through the deployment of military force in support of colonial expansion, which directed the energy away from the otherwise crippling effects of diminishing profit margins.
Whereas racism enabled an easy justification for colonial brutality and systemic violence, antisemitism provided a perfect justification for the creation of the Jew as an enemy within. A few decades later, the figure of the Jew could be connected to the actual interests of working class itself, namely by arguing that Communism is a Jewish ideology. Today’s Jews have different names: they are called Immigrants, Muslims, Arabs or Palestinians. They are all projections of western imaginaries that Edward Said once summarized under the label of Orientalism. But what is important to remember is, that we have a lot more in common with the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank than with Elon Musk or Donald Trump. Whereas our livelihoods depend on – for example – the actual existence and upholding of international law, theirs does not. We may be living in relative safety and luxury now, but it can be taken away from us very easily by those who can deploy excessive means of violence. We may be able to exercise free speech now, but prison is only one sentence away.
Disaffected Sociology 
Leave a comment