Simone Weil’s anti-fascist blueprint
Ros Schwartz’s translation of The Need for Roots makes Weil’s masterpiece feel as urgent today as it was in 1943.
The Need for Roots
In 1942, Simone Weil was tasked by Charles de Gaulle’s Free France movement to write a report on how France could be rebuilt after driving out the Nazi invaders. What she handed in was something else entirely: a bizarre, meandering, politically uncategorizable, at times genuinely disturbing but always astoundingly brilliant masterpiece, published after her death as The Need for Roots.
First appearing in English in 1952, Weil’s treatise has been newly translated by Ros Schwartz. English-speaking readers of Weil might be more familiar with her theological writings, collected in Waiting for God and Gravity and Grace, than her wonkish contributions to radical French politics. But The Need for Roots levels a searing critique of so-called Christian civilization that reads as more urgent than ever in our own era of rising Christian nationalism.
The book opens with a call to jettison the idea of universal human rights, the cornerstone of Western liberalism, in favor of universal human “obligations.” Rights are flimsy things. I can recognize that others have all sorts of rights without changing my behavior whatsoever. I can pass someone begging on the street, lament that their right to food is being infringed—someone should do something!—and walk on. Things change if I shift my perspective from their right to food to my obligation to feed the hungry. Every time I walk on without helping, I fail an absolute and unshirkable obligation.
