In his best known works: “Violence and the sacred”, “Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World”, “The Scapegoat”, “Job, the Victim of His People”, all proposed in Italy by Adelphi editor, there is the disclosure of the violent root that joins ancient and contemporary societies. Girard claims “a passionate identification” with all sacrificial victims, stating that “the man’s true science is never impassable”. In a course of thought that goes through the fields of anthropology, philosophy, history of religions and literary criticism, with deeply religious aims, René Girard urges an absolutely a true second reading of persecutory mechanisms. His “evangelical realism” opposes the utopia of emphatic rationalism which cost and keeps on costing the world millions of victims.

Guy Sorman, numbering him among the true thinkers of our time, wrote that “after Renè Girard it is not possible to conceive western reality as before”.

The prize is delivered by Ulderico Bernardi