The Missing Name

The most widely read business book of its decade contains a complete theory of sacrificial violence, and never names the man whose theory it is. He taught at the same university, at the same time, and the author later paid for his conferences.

A course on the thought of Peter Thiel and René Girard.

Course outline

1. The Missing Name — Chapter fourteen of Zero to One contains a complete anthropological theory of sacrifice, compressed into three pages. The man who built that theory taught at Stanford while Thiel was a student there…
2. The Campus — Stanford radicalised Thiel, but not in the direction the story usually runs. The university already had a politics of its own, and the man who connected Thiel to Girard was the dean of its chapel.
3. What Girard Said — Mimetic theory, in Girard's own words — desire as borrowed, rivalry as structural, the scapegoat as the machine that makes peace out of murder. And the part that rarely travels: his account of the…
4. The First Book — The Diversity Myth, 1995 — Thiel's first book, an account of the Stanford he had just left. It runs Girard's apparatus in Girard's vocabulary, quotes his co-author by name, and never names him.…
5. The Room — July 2004 — Thiel founds Palantir and co-convenes a six-day private seminar with Girard. The volume that came out of it carries his essay naming Girard throughout, and a copyright page recording who…
6. The Domains — A sentence written in 2007 becomes an operation in 2011. Champerty, the Gawker litigation, and the exit politics that runs on the same logic — with the argument that makes all of it follow.
7. What the Teacher Said — Girard's own verdict on competition and autonomy, which contradicts his most famous student on both. Then the moment the theory catches its own author — and what this course thinks the twenty-year…

Part of the Symposium course library.