Simone Weil, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Force is that which turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.1 In the Iliad both the conqueror and the conquered are reduced by force — Achilles dragging Hector becomes as much a thing as Hector himself. The moral catastrophe of force is symmetrical: the one who wields it is degraded as surely as the one who suffers it, even if differently.
This is the structural insight that the early Marxism, the Spanish Civil War, and the ordinary modern moral discourse of justified violence all miss. Yet the analysis is not the pacifism the Iliad essay alone might suggest. The London essays from 1942-43 — The Need for Roots, the unfinished essays on the Free French and the Resistance — work out the conditions under which force can be wielded with the least possible spiritual catastrophe: the wielder must understand the cost, the act must be subordinated to obligations and not to rights, the political form must support attention to the truth of what is being done. Just war is possible but expensive; the expense is the spiritual cost on those who wield force.2
To define force—it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us:...The Iliad or the Poem of Force, pp. 3–4
What a reception this feeble hope gets! Come, friend, you too must die. Why make a fuss about it? Patroclus, he too has died—a far better man than you are. Don't you see how handsome I am, how mighty? A noble father begat me, and I have a goddess for mother.The Iliad or the Poem of Force, pp. 25–26
The Iliad essay is the great essay on force and one of the most influential mid-century meditations on war. Mary McCarthy's translation (1945, in Politics) and her introduction shaped the American reception. Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) and On Violence (1970) develop resonant analyses without direct citation. Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam (1994) and the broader moral-injury literature in military psychology have made the symmetric-degradation thesis empirically vivid. The contemporary just-war literature (Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, 1977) holds a different framework but the conversation is productive. Springsted's Chapter 14, 'Moral Clarity in War,' reads my late position as a modified just-war ethic structured by the attention-to-cost demand. The early apparent pacifism of the Iliad essay is corrected by the late London engagement with the Resistance — I myself volunteered for the Free French and proposed a frontline-nurse corps that the Free French rejected as unrealistic.