An astonishing work of cultural criticism, this book is widely recognized as a brilliant and devastating challenge to conventional views of literature, anthropology, religion, and psychoanalysis. The repression of this collective murder and its repetition in ritual sacrifice then formed the foundations of both religion and the restored social order. How does Christianity, at once the most `sacrificial` of religions and faith with a non-violent ideology, fit into this scheme? Girard grants Freud's point, in Totem and Taboo, that Christianity is similar to primitive religion, but only to refute Freud--if Christ is sacrificed, Girard argues, it is not because God willed it, but because human beings wanted it. The book is not merely, or perhaps not mainly, biblical exegesis, for within its scope fall some of the most vexing problems of social history--the paradox that violence has social efficacy, the function of the scapegoat, the mechanism of anti-semitism.