This thesis examines key works of René Girard (both his earlier literary criticism and his later cultural anthropology) and of Charles Taylor (both his philosophical history and his philosophical anthropology). Both thinkers see the loss of traditional frameworks grounded in religious worldviews as precipitating a crisis of order in the modem period. Girard's diagnosis of this loss of order stems from his analysis of desire as mimetic, an analysis that leads him to argue that scapegoating and sacrifice are essential to the creation of cultural stability and are no longer available today either to individuals or communities. I shall claim that this analysis of desire thoroughly - and, even on Girard’s own terms, problematically - debunks subjectivity and undermines the possibility of any coherent ethical agency. And I shall then go on to argue that Taylor’s philosophy, while taking due cognizance of the crisis of order so acutely identified by Girard, allows us to meet it with a robust and nuanced account of subjectivity and ethical agency - an account that allows us to reject Girard’s apocalyptic forebodings and to imagine that ‘hope and history rhyme’.