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The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots

RELEASED 23/02/2023

One of the foremost French philosophers of the last century, Simone Weil has been 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, her most famous work, she diagnoses the malaise at the heart of modern life: uprootedness, from the past and from community. Written towards the end of World War Two for the Free French Army, Weil's text is an indispensable and perpetually intriguing text for readers and students of philosophy everywhere.

Reviews

  • 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

    T. S. Eliot

  • The patron saint of all outsiders

    André Gide

  • The only great spirit of our time

    Albert Camus

More from this Author

About the Author

Simone Weil

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 (2 vol., 1956), Oppression and Liberty (1958), and Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962).

Simone Weil

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