Simone Weil on Oppression and Liberty: Her Political Thought

Simone Weil oppression and liberty belong together in her political thought: she asked what social arrangements stop people from thinking and acting with understanding, and what a freer society would have to change.

This guide follows that question through her early essays, her factory experience and her wartime writing. It sits within the wider simone weil philosophy overview, where oppression is one strand among several.

What Weil means by oppression

Weil did not treat every hierarchy as oppressive. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, she recognized that some social relations involving deference, hierarchy and order are not necessarily oppressive. The entry adds that the division of labour and material privilege alone do not satisfy her concept of oppression. In her view, oppression appears when a struggle for power takes over how a society is organized.

Her most important early statement is the essay on the causes of liberty and social oppression. The same encyclopedia entry says that in “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934) Weil summarized her early thought and anticipated central elements of her later work. Several of her political essays of this period were collected after her death by Albert Camus under the French title Oppression et liberté (“Oppression and Liberty”), as the same entry notes.

Weil’s purpose in analysing oppression was practical. The Stanford entry says she wanted to give militants an analysis of the real causes of oppression, because without it a socially enticing movement would bring only superficial changes in how production looks, not new and freer forms of structural organization. Liberty, on this reading, is a question of how a society is built, not only of who governs it, as the encyclopedia entry presents her argument.

Power as a trap for rulers and ruled

A distinctive feature of her analysis is that power does not simply benefit those who hold it. The Stanford entry quotes her translated essay as saying that power contains “a sort of fatality which weighs as pitilessly on those who command as on those who obey.” Commanders, in other words, are caught in the same competition for power as the people they command.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy develops a related point. It explains that a social order dividing intellectual from physical labour also divides people into those who command and those who obey. Those who command, it says, could not avoid reading the people they ordered about as means or obstacles to their ends, which wears away the basis of ethical life for everyone involved.

The Stanford entry describes the human cost in terms of thinking. Oppression, it says, limits people from experiencing the world to the full extent of a capability Weil calls “methodical thinking”, and so keeps them from direct contact with reality. The entry also stresses her idea of privilege, which includes more than money or weapons: it includes a body of knowledge closed to the working masses, which produces a culture of specialists, according to the same source.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy also states what a society free from oppression would look like in her account: a society in which people could attend to others, rather than viewing them indifferently or as helping or hindering some personal or sectional goal. This link between attention and liberty explains why her political essays are often read alongside her writing on ethics, as the encyclopedia entry frames it.

• Oppression limits methodical thinking: Oppression limits methodical thinking
• Privilege includes closed knowledge: Privilege includes closed knowledge
• Bureaucracy as a new species of oppression: Bureaucracy as a new species of oppression
• Revolution as opiate: Revolution as opiate
• Eschewing revolution for reform: Eschewing revolution for reform

Factory, bureaucracy and the division of labour

Weil argued that the root of subordination lay in how work is organized more than in who owns property. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy presents her reading of Marx on this point: the worker’s complete subordination to the undertaking and to those who run it, in its wording, is founded on the factory organization and not on the system of property, as the encyclopedia entry explains. For that reason she doubted that abolishing private property would by itself free anyone.

Her own time in industrial work shaped this view. The Stanford entry reports that in her factory journal she moves from the vocabulary of “oppression” to that of “humiliation” and “affliction”, so that her account of suffering becomes more personal. Readers who want the labour side of the story in detail can turn to this guide to simone weil on work, and the dates and circumstances of her working life are set out in the simone weil biography article.

Weil also named bureaucracy as part of the problem. In the Stanford entry’s account, she described modern industrial bureaucracy as “a new species of oppression”, and the difficulty she set for revolutionaries was to build a social organization that does not generate bureaucracy, an anonymous and institutionalized form of force.

Why she distrusted revolution and parties

Weil’s sympathy with the oppressed did not make her a conventional revolutionary. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, she judged that “revolution” in its ordinary sense had itself become an “opiate”, merely inverting who holds force. The same entry says she continued to avoid revolution and worked instead toward reform, aiming at greater equality in the factory through a shift from a structure of subordination to one of collaboration.

Her stance on war followed similar reasoning. The entry reports that, in response to the Spanish Civil War, she argued against fascism while favouring French non-intervention, against the Communist position of the day. Later, in wartime London, the same source says she argued for the complete abolition of political parties, reasoning from Rousseau’s general will that parties subdue the independent individual wills on which democracy depends.

Scholars do not read these positions the same way. The Stanford entry itself observes that her thought defies categorization and that the ways her ideas are taken up often say as much about the commentator as they do about her, which is a useful caution when reading claims that she was simply a Marxist, an anarchist or a conservative.

From liberty to obligations and roots

Later in life Weil wrote less about liberty as a starting point and more about duties and needs. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says she did not begin with rights, nor with the ideal of liberal freedom, and that needs and obligations were more fundamental for her than rights of any kind. In the same entry, her wartime texts for the Free French are described as bringing her moral seriousness to political questions.

The Stanford entry places The Need for Roots (L’enracinement) in this period and adds that Camus published it posthumously in 1949 with Gallimard. It also says the book adds “needs of the soul” as a counterweight to rights. Readers meeting the idea for the first time can find fuller context in the encyclopedia article before moving to the book itself.

Frequently asked questions

Is Weil’s idea of oppression the same as Marx’s?

Which essay should a reader begin with?

Did Weil think rights were the answer to oppression?

Why did she want political parties abolished?