Ressentiment and the Turn to the Victim: Nietzsche, Weber, Scheler

This chapter aims to investigate René Girard’s analysis of ressentiment and religion with a particular interest in developing a comprehensive reading of the Judeo-Christian tradition of the victim. Girard recognized that Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment played a major role in many analyses of the twentieth century. In particular, The Genealogy of Morals and the concept of ressentiment influenced Max Scheler’s interpretation of bourgeois morality and Max Weber’s perspective on the sociology of religion. Nietzsche asserts that there is a complete and necessary coincidence between taking the side of the victim and belonging to a religion of ressentiment. Girard’s mimetic theory provides us with a way to respond to the challenges that are raised in The Genealogy of Morals as well in Scheler’s and Weber’s subsequent theoretical investigations. Girard, more than anyone else, wondered about the crucial point of intersection where Nietzsche analyzed ressentiment, namely the relationship between desire and the foundations of social order. By emphasizing the mimetic dimension of the human condition and mining it for the fundamental characteristics of the relationships that inform our social life, René Girard has thrown light on the social and anthropological warp and weft of the human condition in the Judeo-Christian tradition.