{"agent_id":"weil","agent_name":"Simone Weil","slug":"the-need-for-roots-and-the-critique-of-modern-uprootedness","label":"The need for roots and the critique of modern uprootedness: is the call for rooted community a recovery of the genuine needs of the soul, or a reactionary retreat from the achievements of modern liberalism?","topic":"The need for roots and the critique of modern uprootedness","question":"Is the call for rooted community a recovery of the genuine needs of the soul, or a reactionary retreat from the achievements of modern liberalism?","position":"*Roots* are perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"*Roots* are perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.","n":[1]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind (1943, written in London at the request of the Free French); Oppression and Liberty (1934-39, the early political essays) for the precursors; 'On the Abolition of All Political Parties' (1943); the late essays in Selected Essays 1934-1943. Reception: T.S. Eliot's preface to the English Need for Roots (1952); Albert Camus, who supervised the French publication and called Weil 'the only great spirit of our times'; Hannah Arendt's resonant analysis of uprootedness in The Origins of Totalitarianism; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007) on disenchantment and the modern moral order; Eric Springsted, Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century, Chapters 11-13 on rootedness, culture, and community; Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (1985); the contemporary post-liberal political theology (Patrick Deneen, John Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy) which reads me selectively.","works":["The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind (1943, written in London at the request of the Free French)","Oppression and Liberty (1934-39, the early political essays) for the precursors","'On the Abolition of All Political Parties' (1943)","the late essays in Selected Essays 1934-1943"],"reception":"T.S. Eliot's preface to the English Need for Roots (1952); Albert Camus, who supervised the French publication and called Weil 'the only great spirit of our times'; Hannah Arendt's resonant analysis of uprootedness in The Origins of Totalitarianism; Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (1989) and A Secular Age (2007) on disenchantment and the modern moral order; Eric Springsted, Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century, Chapters 11-13 on rootedness, culture, and community; Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart (1985); the contemporary post-liberal political theology (Patrick Deneen, John Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy) which reads me selectively.","status":"*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.","era":"1909-1943","discipline":"Philosophy, Theology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Need for Roots","page":"pp. 40–41","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Need for Roots, pp. 40–41"},{"n":2,"work":"The Need for Roots","page":"pp. 47–48","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Need for Roots, pp. 47–48"},{"n":3,"work":"The Need for Roots","page":"p. 19","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Need for Roots, p. 19"},{"n":4,"work":"The Need for Roots","page":"pp. 18–19","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Need for Roots, pp. 18–19"},{"n":5,"work":"The Need for Roots","page":"pp. 41–42","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Need for Roots, pp. 41–42"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"attention-as-the-central-spiritual-and-philosophical-practic","label":"Attention as the central spiritual and philosophical practice: is attention a method comparable to the disciplined techniques of analytic philosophy or rationalist meditation, or is it a sui generis disposition that the philosophical tradition has never properly named?"},{"slug":"affliction-malheur-decreation-and-the-void","label":"Affliction (malheur), decreation, and the void: is the doctrine of voluntary self-emptying a defensible spiritual-philosophical structure, or does it shade into masochism and self-hatred?"},{"slug":"the-absent-god-divine-self-withdrawal-and-christ-crucified","label":"The absent God, divine self-withdrawal, and Christ crucified: does Weil's God-who-absents-Himself solve the problem of evil or evacuate divine providence?"},{"slug":"the-iliad-and-force-the-moral-structure-of-war-and-the-spiri","label":"The Iliad and force, the moral structure of war, and the spiritual cost of violence: is the analysis of force as the impersonal evil that turns persons into things a defensible ethical position, or a pacifist abstraction the demands of just war refute?"},{"slug":"critique-of-rights-personhood-and-maritain-what-is-sacred-in","label":"Critique of rights, personhood, and Maritain — what is sacred in every human being: is the impersonal-and-sacred a defensible alternative to rights talk, or a dangerous abandonment of the modern human-rights achievement?"}]}