Simone Weil (1909–1943) was one of the great souls of the 20th century. She was flawed in many respects, but she possessed a rare and admirable sensitivity to things of the spirit. Though she came from a comfortably bourgeois family of French Jews and graduated from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, she deeply sympathized with the afflictions of the poor. As a result, she combined teaching and political activism with (awkward) stints trying to work in factories or live alongside France’s agricultural workers. The English man of letters Malcolm Muggeridge, who admired her profoundly, couldn’t deny that her “passion to identify [herself] with the downtrodden and oppressed” had elements of farce about it, given her “absent-mindedness and congenital clumsiness.” Yet for all that she seemed to embody the tendency of well-off Marxists to salve their guilt through inept and often unwanted displays of solidarity with the poor, Weil would not remain on the Left for long—at least, not in any simple or unqualified sense. Unlike many of her peers, she caught on early to the sinister totalitarian propensities of Marxist ideology and its rigid materialism. And she came to embody in a quite admirable way a genuine, non-ideological concern for the poor and “afflicted,” as she called them.

As the Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz observed in a particularly insightful 1960 essay (included in the recent collection of Weil’s writings, On the Abolition of All Political Parties), Weil saw with piercing clarity that Marx’s “new ethics of professional revolutionaries” was nothing more than a “new form of domination.” She had the great merit, Miłosz wrote, of seeing through both the “social or national conformism” encouraged by some forms of traditionalism, and “the shallowness of the so-called progressives.” This ability to look past ideology to the heart of things set her apart from fellow travelers and prepared her for the defining event of her life: a dramatic conversion to Christianity. By 1938, Weil was (in her arresting self-description) “captured by Christ” in a series of religious experiences that profoundly shaped her subsequent intellectual and spiritual itinerary. She only had five years left to live. They would be among the worst years of the 20th century.

During the Nazi occupation of France, Weil took her parents to America and worked for the Free French resistance movement. At the end of her life she returned to Europe and settled in London, where she feverishly worked on a book outlining the principles of civilizational renewal that ought to guide Europe and France after the war. This would become The Need For Roots (1949), perhaps her most important work. It was to be her last: she contracted a severe case of tuberculosis, aggravated by her steadfast refusal to take in more calories a day than those who suffered under German occupation in France. Her desire to identify with the suffering of others had always hovered in the hazy middle ground between authentic holiness and psychological obsession. Now it helped send her to an early grave: on August 24, 1943, Weil died at the age of 34.

The world came to know her through selections from her letters and notebooks, published as Gravity and Grace (1947) and Waiting for God (1950) in the half-dozen years after her death. They made it to press through the efforts of three men: her counsellor and friend Father Joseph-Marie Perrin, with whom she constantly debated the merits of joining the Catholic Church; the French Catholic agrarian philosopher Gustave Thibon, on whose farm she worked during the early years of the Vichy regime; and Albert Camus, then an influential publisher at Gallimard in Paris. To these men, the intellectual world owes a great debt.

But Weil’s thought is most fully articulated in The Need for Roots, available from Penguin Classics in a quite competent and readable new English rendition by the respected translator Ros Schwartz. It is a book that demands, and rewards, sustained critical engagement. The future Weil envisions in it is not readily classifiable on the ideological spectrum. T.S. Eliot, in a 1952 preface to the first English-language edition of the book, perfectly characterized Weil’s double-edged politics: “[S]he appears as a stern critic of both Right and Left; at the same time more truly a lover of order and hierarchy than most of those who call themselves Conservative, and more truly a lover of the people than most of those who call themselves Socialist.” The relatively unclassifiable character of Weil’s thought is one source of her continuing appeal to the widest range of readers and critics.

Beyond the Binary

Weil’s spiritual and political insights are often penetrating, even luminous, but they are also accompanied by an implacability of judgment that is sometimes hard to distinguish from what Eliot called “an almost outrageous arrogance.” Yet, as Eliot also observed, the reader should be less concerned with endorsing or disputing her strongly held judgments than with the elevating experience of making “contact with a great soul.” There is an undeniable élan that informs Weil’s thought and writing. She gives the impression of having grappled passionately with profound spiritual realities, and she is able to communicate that passion vividly to the receptive reader. This makes the frustrations that arise from engaging with her writings much easier to bear.

Her Free French superiors no doubt found her musings and scribblings in London too philosophical, too distant from the issues at hand, to be of immediate practical use in devising a viable future for postwar France. About that they were surely right. But it is precisely the work’s “untimeliness,” its partial transcendence of the here and now, that has allowed it to endure. Even in her most committed leftist phase, when she collaborated with Trotskyites, Weil saw through the utopian pretenses of Marxism. She feared bureaucratic collectivism as much as the injustices she believed accompanied the market order. She kept a safe distance from the French Communist party because she fully realized that an aggrieved mob is, as Plato observed in Book 6 of the Republic, a “Great Beast”—prone to conformity and coercion, readily manipulated by sophists and demagogues. Weil understood that totalitarian control over unruly crowds could come just as easily from the left as from the right.

At the same time, Weil was no conventional liberal or French republican. She rejected the abstract concept of human rights floating free and detached from any objective order. All true rights are, she thought, subordinate to the primordial moral obligations that bind human persons together in a society. Rights “always appear to be associated with certain conditions,” but obligations “alone can be unconditional” since obligations are “eternal” and “echo the eternal destiny of human beings.” Obligations for Weil are far from airy and abstract: they arise directly from the self-evident and undeniable reality that we must show respect for flesh-and-blood human beings. It is, for instance, “an eternal obligation to a human being not to let them suffer from hunger when one has the opportunity to help them.” That is an obligation recognized by all the world’s high religions, but especially by the gospel of Christ.

For Weil, a political order founded exclusively on absolute individual rights must appoint the living to sit in arbitrary judgment over the dead, empowering them to break whichever traditions or precedents they choose. This destroys the soul-enriching continuity of civilization: without “the spiritual treasures amassed by the dead,” civic, social, and individual lives are impoverished. Human beings lose touch with “man’s eternal destiny” as revealed in the wisdom that has been “passed on from generation to generation.” For this reason, Weil despised the fanatical ideology of “progress,” with its illusion that the roots, obligations, and spiritual inheritance left us by our forebears can be abandoned as we move inexorably toward a brighter future.

More than Matter

As if this were not enough to unsettle the modern liberal or progressive, the first half of The Need for Roots presents a catalogue of what Weil calls “needs of the soul,” which any regime must take into account and satisfy if it is to be considered truly humane. Nothing less than “order” tops the list as “the main need of the soul, the one closest to its eternal destiny.” Without lawful order—of the kind that another tradition calls “ordered liberty”—human beings cannot fulfill their duties to one another or enjoy the rights that emerge when obligations are recognized and satisfied. At the two extremes of chaos and tyranny, men and women lose control over their own actions, leaving them “wounded in their love of the good.”

Civilized order is the fundamental need of the soul. But by that very same token, any civilized order worthy of the name must also leave room for equality, since that too is “a vital need of the soul.” Weil, in contradistinction to so many of her contemporaries, was no doctrinaire egalitarian on the material plane. Material hardships belong to some professions more than others and may even “contribute to the nobility of those who suffer them.” Rather than statist projects of economic redistribution, then, Weil has in mind a deeper spiritual equality according to which respect “is due to every human being” as a human being. This spiritually demanding imperative, though incompatible with widespread poverty and destitution, has nothing to do with economic collectivism and its associated train of abuses.

Sounding ever more conservative, Weil proclaims that the next three needs of the soul are hierarchy, honor, and the “need for punishment.” Punishment as a measured enactment of justice is not to be confused with cruelty or coercion, and hierarchy has nothing to do with mere power-seeking or exploitation. Rather, “a certain veneration” and “a certain devotion” rightly belong to our “superiors in the political and social order.” We owe this devotion not to individual persons as such but to those in positions of authority because of the “symbolic function” they perform in society. Rightly understood, hierarchy reminds contentious human beings of the sacred domain above them, an “eternal order” that determines “the obligations of each human being towards their fellows.” Weil links authority, and hierarchy, to duties well fulfilled and not to power sought as an end in itself.

Such categories and considerations are largely alien to liberal political theory. The same might be said of honor, which is much more an aristocratic than a democratic virtue. But Weil argues that life is impoverished without a “tradition of greatness,” even as she refuses to identify such greatness with imperial or colonial pursuits, as did Alexis de Tocqueville. She also recognizes “the need for honor in professional life to be satisfied.” As moral communities, professional organizations have an obligation to “[keep] alive the memory of the heritage of greatness, heroism, probity, generosity and genius created in the exercise of that profession.” In all this, Weil’s great strength over her Marxist counterparts is to look beyond the material; she never loses sight of the moral contents of life.

Putting Down Roots

She is less convincing on the subject of “freedom of opinion” as a vital need of the soul. She wants to differentiate this need from freedom of association, which she sees as merely “an expedient of practical life.” She never really explains her reason for so casually dismissing the connection between the twin freedoms of opinion and association drawn by important theorists such as Tocqueville, Robert Nisbet, Peter Berger, and Richard John Neuhaus. For these powerful thinkers, “the art of voluntary association” is the indispensable middle course between unmoored individualism and bureaucratic lockstep. Association in a healthy community is what allows individuals to form prudent and considered opinions.

Weil, by contrast, expresses her commitment to “total, unlimited freedom of expression for any opinion whatsoever, without any restriction or reservation.” This is, she says, “an absolute need” for the soul and the intellect. But she then proceeds to qualify this judgment extravagantly. As soon as an author gives advice to readers on how they ought to live, the political community has an obligation to ensure that the advice will not “cause any illegitimate prejudice to any human being” or even hint at “any negation, express or implicit, of the eternal obligations to the human being, once these obligations have been solemnly recognized in law.” Without the self-correcting mechanisms of free association, Weil’s free-opinion absolutism devolves, as it must, into its opposite extreme: unworkable and coercive state control.

In this same section of The Need for Roots, Weil introduces a theme she would develop at greater length in a 1943 essay that is now available in English as “On the Abolition of all Political Parties.” Following Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she sees competition between warring parties as ultimately fatal to a self-governing republic. She particularly fears “the formation of a party that has the stated aim of destroying” the constitutional order, a fate to which the Weimar Republic succumbed. Weil’s concern is a serious one. A subtle reader of Rousseau’s Social Contract, she does not confuse the “general will” with unlimited or totalitarian popular sovereignty, as many superficial critics have. And she readily acknowledges that political parties in England and the United States “have traditions, a spirit, a function that makes them incomparable to anything else” (Weil knew England far better than she knew the United States). Still, she puts too much confidence in the kind of generalized informal plebescite Rousseau imagined to produce a “universal consensus [that] may point at truth,” unmediated by any organizing bodies. So she is far too quick to identify political partisanship, even in a qualified form, with what she jarringly calls “intellectual leprosy.”

Weil returns to surer footing in The Need for Roots as she elucidates the remaining needs of the soul. These include security (not a cradle-to-grave welfare state but protections against “afflictions” such as terror, tyranny, and military conquest); private property (though Weil remains excessively suspicious of “bourgeois” money and finance); and “participation in collective goods” that are proper to “truly civic life” (such as public monuments and gardens). Weil is less keen on public ownership—a leftist fetish she never shared—than on truly communal access to public space and belonging that is “granted even to the poorest of the poor.” Here, again, Weil transcends the facile distinction between Left and Right. At her most illuminating, she escapes the ideological rigidity and monotonous predictability that are hallmarks of contemporary political thought.

According to Weil, all these various needs of the soul are grounded in the need for rootedness (enracinement in French). This “is the most important and least acknowledged human spiritual need.” It alone allows “real, active and natural participation in the life of a collectivity that keeps alive treasures of the past and has aspirations for the future.” This is the kind of life most “natural” to human beings. Later, Weil relates rootedness to patriotism of a kind nourished by love, compassion, and salutary limits, rather than by allegiance to a militaristic and authoritarian nation or nation-state that “demands everything.” She aspires to a new form of “greatness” for France and other European peoples, one that eschews imperialism and gives “the poorest section of the people a privileged moral place.”

A Woman Outside of Time

Many of Weil’s reflections on this theme are eloquent and illuminating. But they are strangely a- or even anti-political since she seems to have an allergy to the nation-state as such. Even this failing is instructive, as she breezily (and wrongly) equates decent national loyalty with aggressive nationalism in a manner typical of our own age. She likewise undersells the virtues of the French empire (recognized by many Francophone Africans themselves) and rather absurdly compares it to the genocidal imperialism of Nazi Germany. Here her judgment loses all balance and measure. Contemporary scholars are particularly prone to latch on uncritically to her exaggerated and overwrought “anti-colonialist” sentiments.

Equally misconceived, and far more troubling to modern sensibilities, is Weil’s petty and overbroad polemic against all things Roman and Jewish. In Weil’s judgment, though Communism pushed the delusion of human progress to a truly monstrous extreme, that delusion first arose from the eschatological hopes for a kingdom of God on earth that early Christians inherited from their Jewish origins. Weil was an idiosyncratic Platonist, and from 1937 on her instinct was to keep divine things pure and detached from the messy realities of human life. She had an excellent command of Greek and saw Christian intimations in Plato, Sophocles’ Antigone, and even in Homer. At the same time, she saw historical Christianity as too timebound, too concerned with salvation and progress in this life rather than the one to come. In The Need for Roots she unfairly identifies the Jewish moral impulse with the Roman project of world domination, both of which she caricatures beyond all recognition. She sees nothing noble in ancient Roman “virtue”—no courage or prudence to be admired or imitated—and she finds in the Romans only “an atheist, idolatrous people, worshipping not just stone or bronze statues, but also themselves.”

For Weil, Rome was the coercive state par excellence, and Judaism was its spiritual counterpart. In the compendium of her notebooks Gravity and Grace, she writes that “only Israel could stand up to Rome, because it resembled it.” Each was as totalitarian and messianic in its way as the worst 20th-century regime, and each had only deleterious effects on the development of the Christian religion. Weil consequently indulges in a form of the Marcionite heresy, attempting to sever the New Testament from the Old (with a passing exception for Job, Isaiah, and the Psalms). Her distaste for all things time-bound and earthly here reaches its ugliest, leading her to condemn the world’s great civilizations—to which she owed much of her insight—merely for living and operating in the fallen world. More personally, her contempt for Rome and her theological anti-Semitism (not to be confused with any manner of support for cruelty toward the Jewish people) significantly influenced her decision in the early 1940s not to join the Roman Catholic Church. Her Christian Platonism was profoundly idiosyncratic, and Weil in the end remained a spiritual party of one.

Despite these significant blemishes, The Need for Roots remains a beautiful and penetrating book. In the second half, Weil ranges widely over the sources of modern “uprootedness.” These include industrialism, materialism, militarism, and disregard for spiritual values. She rejects the secular philosophy of modernity because it is false and reductive, and because it can provide no “obstacle to totalitarianism’s idolatrous tendency.” She tellingly notes that “if children are accustomed to not thinking of God, they will become fascists or Communists out of a need to give themselves to something.” One might add today that listless nihilism is also a likely consequence of atheism or spiritual indifference. Endowed by the advance of science with limitless access to material comfort, but starved for spiritual meaning, the young mindlessly immerse themselves in stultifying technologies or in sexual pleasures that are as banal as they are ultimately unerotic. The unsatisfying emptiness of this condition has primed many young people to accept woke fanaticism as mindlessly and uncritically as the Bolsheviks of Weil’s day embraced millenarian revolution.

At its most discerning, The Need for Roots outlines a new “mission” or “vocation” for the postwar era, one that aims to spiritualize human work. In contrast to the forced labor imposed by totalitarian societies and the acquisitive rat race of unfettered capitalism, Weil hopes to elevate work from “the realm of necessity” to an essential hallmark of human dignity. Work should be part and parcel of self-respect, she argues, and there should be social plaudits afforded to work well done (here she acknowledges her debt to papal encyclicals). With reference to concepts like vocation, craft, and honor for the “affliction” of labor, Weil moves beyond a debased materialist view of human beings as units of productivity or subjects of merely physical satisfaction.

Here, one could accuse Weil of utopianism or wishful thinking. And it’s true that for all its astute insights about politics, The Need for Roots is not strictly a work of political philosophy. It dances around politics as such, excessively spiritualizing the political realm while still illuminating it from the edges. As Weil writes in Gravity and Grace, her hope is to operate in the metaxu, or “the in-between”—a category she derived, as Eric Voegelin would do later in a somewhat different way, from Plato’s Symposium. As a Christian Platonist, Weil draws a sharp distinction between our human, material world—the world of necessity, weighed down by real and metaphorical gravity—and the world of grace shed forth eternally from God’s infinite love. But in the metaxu, the two worlds make contact. Incarnate human beings can be “attentive” to the Good—they can “wait” for God’s presence to manifest itself by cultivating a receptivity to mystery. We human beings cannot directly “touch” or access eternity: we live in an intermediary zone, “the region of good and evil,” where ideals are always imperfectly embodied in “those relative and mixed good things (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.”

Freedom Without Apology

“Truly earthly blessings” are, Weil insists, to be found only in the metaxu. Without idolizing these contingent blessings or elevating them to the status of pure divine happiness, it is right to esteem earthly goods like home and country both as goods in themselves, and as “a stepping-stone towards God.” For all its majesty, this outlook hardly encourages a detailed approach to the particulars of electoral or legal theory. It is more a theological attitude than a political one. But if Weil’s idea of a humanized modern economy is nowhere found in practice, that is in part because she was once again charting a via media, a path not taken either by totalitarian socialists or the dreary welfare bureaucrats of Europe. Her insights ought to call forth prudent and viable practical applications from those who share her broad spiritual and political vision.

Sadly, that is not where the interests of most contemporary intellectuals lie. Today, there is a veritable Weil industry devoted to churning out academic publications that obscure as much as they clarify. Though there are certainly important exceptions, Weil scholars tend to obsess over feminism and colonialism, or to magnify Weil’s early interest in Marxism out of all proportion. Using or abusing her for their own purposes, they bring her into dialogue with thinkers alien to her concerns such as John Rawls or the nihilistic European postmodernists. In an otherwise informative introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of The Need for Roots, Kate Kirkpatrick of King’s College, London affords far too much time and respect to the ideological commissars who chastise Weil for her “seeming acceptance and repetition of the prejudices of her time.” Weil, who deplored colonialism, is taken brutally and nonsensically to task by these ideologues for using words like indigène, with its connotation of the primitive or the savage. Kirkpatrick notes, more neutrally this time, that Weil’s “use of biblical, classical and historical sources has alienated many on grounds of methodology, accuracy and ethics.” But what would Weil be without her searching engagement with those very sources? If they detract so severely from her work, why bother with it at all?

In the end, Kirkpatrick wisely pulls back and calls for Weil to be read with “openness and generosity.” But Weil’s greatest interpreters and earliest champions—Gustave Thibon, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, Czesław Miłosz, Malcolm Muggeridge, and her biographer Richard Rees—did not need to talk themselves or their readers begrudgingly into “openness and generosity.” They embodied it, without reserve. Humanism, Christian or otherwise, needs no excuses, and neither do intellectual or spiritual greatness as such. Weil’s contempt for totalitarianism, her compassion for the soul in all its grandeur and misery, are reasons enough to love her and embrace her work without footnoting or hedging it in with pre-scripted ideological reservations. The inability of modern scholars to approach Weil with that kind of openness is symptomatic of their debilitating prejudices and their addiction to a few well-worn tracks of repetitive thought. It is precisely for her ability to help us break free of these tired intellectual grooves that Weil remains essential reading.