The Scapegoat: Violence, Law and Origin

Beginning with the current environment of populism, this article considers the scapegoat as a general notion and as it appears in the work of René Girard and Sigmund Freud. For the latter thinkers, myth, ritual remembrance and current practices in the present, as proposed, for example, by Hobbes, form the basis of the method that would expose the reality of the violent origin of society, the law and the political. The reliance on secondary data means that the origin is only grasped speculatively, not scientifically. The article develops the implications of this for an understanding of the status of the law as a bulwark against scapegoating. The conclution is that to combat injustice, law must be united with a certain transcendence.