Simone Weil

Ros Schwartz

Kate Kirkpatrick

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The Power of Words

Simone Weil: An Anthology

The Need for Roots

A masterpiece … Today it retains an eerie prescience. Looking to the past, Weil spoke to future generations who would feel, as she did, that history is a trap we only half understand … luminous

One of the most important writings of a unique, flawed and controversial genius, this book warns that modern societies will only be able to resist fascism by a wholesale spring-cleaning of our political imagination in the light of spiritual practice. An excellent, lucid and readable new translation

This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed; books the effect of which, we can only hope, will become apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation

Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being

A new translation of Simone Weil's best-known work: a political, philosophical and spiritual treatise on what human life could be 
What do humans require to be truly nourished? Simone Weil, one of the foremost philosophers of the last century, envisaged us all as being bound by unconditional, eternal obligations towards every other human being. In The Need for Roots, her most famous work, she argued that our greatest need was to be rooted: in a community, a place, a shared past and collective future hopes. Written for the Free French movement while she was exiled in London during the Second World War, Weil's visionary combination of philosophy, politics and mysticism is her answer to the question of what life without occupation - and oppression - might be. 'The patron saint of all outsiders' Andre Gide 
'The only great spirit of our time' Albert Camus 
Translated by Ros Schwartz, with an introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick.

Simone Weil (Author) Simone Weil (1909-43) was a French political activist, mystic and a singular figure in French philosophy. She studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, obtained her agrégation (teaching diploma) in philosophy in 1931, worked at Renault from 1934 to 1935, enlisted in the International Brigades in 1936 and worked as a farm labourer in 1941. She left France in 1942 for New York and then London, where she worked for General de Gaulle's Free French movement. Most of her works, published posthumously, consist of some notebooks and a collection of religious essays. They include, in English, Waiting for God (1951), Gravity and Grace (1952), The Need for Roots (1952), Notebooks (two volumes, 1956), Oppression and Liberty (1958) and Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962). Kate Kirkpatrick (Introducer) Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. She is the author of several books and articles on twentieth-century French philosophy, including Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the internationally acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019).

An icon of twentieth-century French philosophy, Simone Weil was described by André Gide as 'the patron saint of all outsiders' and by Albert Camus as 'the only great spirit of our time'. In this, one of her last and best-known works, she offers a vision of what human life could be - where the needs of our bodies are met and the needs of the soul, too, are better known and nurtured. 
 
Written in 1943, when France was occupied and Weil was working in the offices of the Free France in London, The Need for Roots responds to a plea both timely and timeless: what can satisfy the cry of our hearts for justice? In the same decade that saw the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Weil argues that rights alone are inadequate to the task - and encourages her contemporaries not to repeat the mistakes of the French Revolution and the malaise of modern life. The alternative she offers has intrigued and inspired generations of readers since.

The Need for Roots

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