The Need for Roots

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 *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 WilliamsThis 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. EliotThe patron saint of all outsiders – André GideThe only great spirit of our time – Albert Camus

Simone Weil (1909-43) was a French political activist, mystic and a singular figure in French philosophy. She studied at the elite cole Normale Superieure, obtained her agregation (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 (two volumes, 1956), Oppression and Liberty (1958) and Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962).