Simone Weil, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Roots are perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.1 To be rooted is to participate by one's place, one's labour, one's relationships, and one's cultural inheritance in a community whose moral and intellectual treasures one helps to transmit and renew. Uprootedness (déracinement) is the structural condition of modern industrial-bureaucratic society; it is what colonialism does to the colonized, what industrial labour does to the worker, what mass urbanization does to the rural community, what the centralizing state does to local attachment.
The Need for Roots names the obligations of the political community to its members and lists the needs of the soul — order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honour, punishment, freedom of opinion, security, risk, private property, collective property, truth — that any adequate political form must respect. The analysis is not nostalgia for a vanished pre-modernity but a structural diagnosis of what modern political life lacks and what future political work must restore.2345
UPROOTEDNESS To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural 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 Need for Roots, pp. 40–41
Conquests are not of life, they are of death at the very moment they take place. It is the distillations from the living past which should be jealously preserved, everywhere, whether it be in Paris or Tahiti, for there are not too many such on the entire globe. It would be useless to turn one's back on the past in order simply to concentrate on the future.The Need for Roots, pp. 47–48
Deprivation of honour attains its extreme degree with that total deprivation of respect reserved for certain categories of human beings. In France, this affects, under various forms, prostitutes, ex-convicts, police agents and the sub-proletariat composed of colonial immigrants and natives. Categories of this kind ought not to exist.The Need for Roots, p. 19
What they symbolize is that realm situated high above all men and whose expression in this world is made up of the obligations owed by each man to his fellowmen. A veritable hierarchy presupposes a consciousness on the part of the superiors of this symbolic function and a realization that it forms the only legitimate object of devotion among their subordinates.The Need for Roots, pp. 18–19
Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures. UPROOTEDNESS IN THE TOWNS There are social conditions in which an absolute and continuous dependence on money prevails—those of the wage-earning class, especially now that piece-work obliges each workman to have his attention continually taken up with the subject of his pay. It is in these social conditions that the disease of uprootedness is most acute.The Need for Roots, pp. 41–42
The Need for Roots (1943, posthumous 1949) was supervised in publication by Albert Camus, whose preface called me 'the only great spirit of our times'; T.S. Eliot's preface to the English translation (Wills 1952) drew it into the Anglophone political-conservative conversation. Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007) develop resonant analyses of uprootedness, disenchantment, and the modern moral order. The post-liberal political theology of recent decades (Patrick Deneen, John Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy, the broader communitarian and integralist traditions) reads Need for Roots selectively, sometimes pulling it toward a reactionary position the text resists. Springsted (Chapters 11-13) reads the work as the late synthesis of the spiritual and political concerns. The position is alive in contemporary debates about modern community, work, and political form.