The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being

by Simone Weil, Ros Schwartz (Translator), Kate Kirkpatrick (Introduction)

Overview

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.
'The patron saint of all outsiders' Andre Gide

'The only great spirit of our time' Albert Camus

Translated by Ros Schwartz, with an introduction by Kate Kirkpatrick.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780141994192
Publisher:	Penguin UK
Publication date:	10/26/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	314,533
File size:	856 KB

About the Author

Simone Weil (Author)
Simone Weil (1909-43) was a French political activist, mystic and a singular figure in French philosophy. She studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, obtained her agrégation (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).

Kate Kirkpatrick (Introducer)
Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. She is the author of several books and articles on twentieth-century French philosophy, including Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the internationally acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Translator's Foreword	xv
Part I	The Needs of the Soul	1
	Order	10
	Liberty	12
	Obedience	14
	Responsibility	15
	Equality	16
	Hierarchism	19
	Honour	19
	Punishment	20
	Freedom of Opinion	22
	Security	32
	Risk	33
	Private Property	34
	Collective Property	35
	Truth	36
Part II	Uprootedness	41
	Uprootedness in the Towns	45
	Uprootedness in the Countryside	78
	Uprootedness and Nationhood	98
Part III	The Growing of Roots	183