Comparative Desire and Social Violence: Mimetic Structure, Inequity, and the Scapegoat Dynamic
Social experiences of unfairness resist standard distributional accounts. This article argues that comparative relations do not merely shape responses to unequal outcomes but participate in constituting the sense of entitlement through which those outcomes are experienced as unfair. Drawing on René Girard’s social theory of mimetic desire, Leon Festinger’s social comparison theory, Axel Honneth’s account of recognition, and empirical research on inequity aversion from behavioural economics and comparative psychology, it develops a single mechanism—comparative entitlement formation—linking proximate comparison, the felt claim it generates, grievance, and, under determinate conditions, displacement onto vulnerable third parties. The argument is positioned between two literatures that approach the phenomenon from opposite directions and leave the same gap: egalitarian political philosophy has moved from the distribution of bundles toward the quality of social relations without supplying an account of how a comparative sense of entitlement is formed, while the recent literature on political grievance documents comparative resentment in detail without theorising the mechanism that generates it. Two consequences follow. First, the characteristic irrationality of unfairness experience—its disproportionate intensity under conditions of social proximity and similarity—reflects the mechanics of comparative entitlement formation rather than a failure of rational judgement. Second, the harms produced when such entitlements are frustrated are second-order costs of institutional arrangements: they are generated by distributive structures, borne by parties outside the initial justification, and cannot be externalised from the basic structure. The article specifies the conditions under which the mechanism operates, the evidential criteria for identifying its products, and the limits beyond which it does not extend.
Published in Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2026
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