The Need for Roots
Simone Weil
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.
'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