The Need for Roots
  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241467978
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $26.99

The Need for Roots

Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Feb 2024
EBook
26 Oct 2023
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A new translation of Simone Weil's best-known work: a political, philosophical and spiritual treatise on what human life could be

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.
  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241467978
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $26.99
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Also by Simone Weil

On The Abolition Of All Political Parties
Simone Weil: An Anthology
War and the Iliad
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Praise for The Need for Roots

The only great spirit of our time

Albert Camus

The patron saint of all outsiders

André Gide

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

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

Rowan Williams

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

Madoc Cairns, TLS