The Need for Roots by Simone Weil: Ideas and Context

The Need for Roots is Simone Weil’s late political work on what societies owe their members: roots in a community, a place, and a shared past and future, set against the uprooting caused by money, war and colonization.

This guide explains the book’s main ideas and how reference works place it. It is one title among many covered in the simone weil books guide.

What the book is

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Need for Roots (L’enracinement) was the most important work of her London period, and Albert Camus published it posthumously in 1949 with Gallimard. The same entry gives its full English title as The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties toward Mankind, in a translation by Arthur Wills.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the circumstances. In London Weil was set to work analysing political documents sent from Resistance committees in France, many of which concerned the reconstruction of France after the hoped-for Allied victory. Her contributions, including this book, were never finally completed, in that encyclopedia’s words, though what exists shows how she brought her moral seriousness to political questions.

What Weil means by roots

The Stanford entry calls the concept of “roots” crucial to her late political thought. It explains that the image presents society as dynamic and living while insisting that stability and security are needed if growth and flourishing are to happen for the individual. The entry lists what rootedness involves: taking part in the life of a community, feeling a sense of connection to a place, and keeping links to cultural history and hopes for the future, as that article summarizes it.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes Weil’s own definition: a human being has roots by virtue of “participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.” The encyclopedia entry presents this as the political answer to affliction, which uproots a life.

• Major work from London period: Major work from London period
• Subtitle and translator: Subtitle and translator
• Roots crucial to late political thought: Roots crucial to late political thought
• Roots conceptualize society as living: Roots conceptualize society as living
• Community, place, temporal links: Community, place, temporal links

Uprootedness and its causes

The longest section of the book, according to the Stanford entry, describes modern uprootedness (déracinement), which occurs when the imagined modern nation and money are the only binding forces in society. The entry says Weil characterizes this condition as a threat to the human soul.

The entry adds that, besides war and colonization, she points to money and to contemporary education as self-perpetuating forces that uproot human life. It quotes her calling modern education a machine for producing diplomas, in other words jobs, a phrase the encyclopedia article ties to capitalism.

The Stanford entry also reads Weil’s criticism of education as targeting a Roman inheritance for cultivating prestige with respect to the nation, which she links to the form patriotism has taken in modern states. In the entry’s account, her concern is therefore larger than schooling: it is the whole pattern of loyalties that holds a society together, as set out in the same article.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy frames uprootedness as an ethical and spiritual condition. It describes a modern world committed to an assertive, individualistic and rights-based conception of justice amid the loss of any living sense of the sacred, and says that in this sense everyone was uprooted. That entry adds that Marx and Weber had noticed the condition without seeing it as an ethical sickness.

Needs, obligations and the soul

The book belongs to Weil’s turn from rights to duties. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says that for her needs and obligations were more fundamental than rights of any kind, and that a politics opposing affliction had to be a moral politics. The Stanford entry says The Need for Roots adds “needs of the soul” as another counterweight to rights, as the entry puts it.

Weil’s aim was not to replace cultures. The Stanford entry stresses that the goal of rootedness is not to change cultural values as such, but to change how individuals in those cultures read and orient themselves toward them, a point that links her critique of colonialism to her idea of roots.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains why bodily provision is not enough. In its reading, a politics of affliction could not stop at meeting humanity’s bodily needs; there had to be a politics that met the needs of the soul as well. A related passage it quotes states that obligation is concerned with the needs in this world of the souls and bodies of human beings, whoever they may be, as the encyclopedia entry reports.

The Stanford entry places roots at the centre of this scheme. It describes the concept as a bridge between the reality of society and the ideal of supernatural justice, and says that establishing roots enables relations to the world on the level of the nation, the organically developing community and the school, which nourish both the individual and the community, according to the Stanford article.

The Stanford entry sums up this stage of her ethics by saying Weil presents not a law-based or rights-based but a compassion-based morality. It notes that, although she held that obligations to others must be universal, she did not want to universalize law in a Kantian fashion; her aim was for cultures to continue their own traditions, as the entry explains. Readers comparing her with other moral philosophers should keep that contrast in view.

A new patriotism and free labour

In her late thought, the Stanford entry says, Weil sees roots as allowing for a “new patriotism” based on compassion. This departs from her earlier critical distance from any collectivity, a shift the same entry notes.

As an alternative to uprootedness, the entry reports, she outlines a civilization based not on force, which turns a person into a thing, but on free labour. Readers interested in how her notes on such themes developed can consult the guide to simone weil notebooks, while a different collection of her writing is described in the article on waiting for god simone weil.

How to read it with care

A practical way into the book is to hold three terms together: roots, uprootedness and the needs of the soul. Each is explained by the reference sources above in the context of her wider politics, so a reader can follow the argument without first mastering her vocabulary of attention and affliction.

Because the text was left unfinished, readers should treat it as a working draft of ideas rather than a polished treatise. The Stanford entry also notes that Weil’s writing in this book is refracted through her religious experience, and it observes that commentators often reveal as much about themselves as about her, so claims about whether the book is conservative, socialist or religious in intent are best checked against the reference sources named here.

Frequently asked questions

Who published The Need for Roots?

What does uprootedness mean in the book?

Is the book about rights?

Was the book finished?