THE NEED FOR ROOTS
Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind
Simone Weil, Arthur Wills (Translator), Preface by T. S. Elliot
Routledge, reprint (2001)
(published posthumously as L'Enracinement in 1949)

"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war. Gasoline is much more likely than wheat to be a cause of international conflict." (from The Need for Roots, 1949) Quoted on Pegasos website

"The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds, the effective exercise of a right springing not from the individual who possesses it, but from other men who consider themselves as being under a certain obligation towards him. Recognition of an obligation makes it effectual. An obligation which goes unrecognized by anybody loses none of the full force of its existence. A right which goes unrecognized by anybody is not worth very much.

It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as between object and subject. A man, considered in isolation, only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights. He, in his turn, has rights, when seen from the point of view of other men, who recognize that they have obligations towards him. A man left alone in the universe would have no rights whatever, but he would have obligations...." Simone Weil, The Need for Roots (2001 edition), Part 1, "The Needs of the Soul," pp. 3–4

BOOK DESCRIPTION
In this, her most famous book, Weil reflects on the importance of religious and political social structures in the life of the individual.

"...Because...questions of society, work, and oppression occupied Weil throughout her life there is, of course, a certain amount of change to be expected in the way she treats the issues. The book The Need for Roots..., Weil's last work, is the fruit of these changes. In it she claims that it is obligations to persons, and not rights expected from others, that constitutes the only truly just basis of society. She concludes with the argument that work understood in its spiritual essence...should be the spiritual core of any civilization...." (from The Works of Simone Weil, by Eric O. Springsted on Theology Today website)

PUBLISHER
Hailed by Andre Gide as the patron saint of all outsiders, Simone Weil's short life was ample testimony to her beliefs. In 1943, the final year of her life, unable to join the resistance movement in France, she worked in London for the Free French government in exile. Here she was commissioned to outline a plan for the renewal of Europe after the scourge of Nazism. The Need for Roots was the direct result. In it she seized the opportunity to denounce the false values of contemporary civilization. In the cult of materialism she witnessed a devastating loss of spirit and consequently of human values. To counteract this she sets out a radical vision for spiritual and political renewal with a passion for truth which sweeps through these pages. The book has become a lasting spiritual testament for our age, where we are confronted, as T.S. Eliot comments, by a 'genius akin to that of the saints'.

"Simone Weil was 'left' in her politics and deeply religious and it was her spirituality and theology that determined all of her commitments, including those of her politics.  As she saw things, there was no other possibility for a believer. She wrote, and she meant, that faith was 'more realist than is realist policy' (The Need for Roots at 211): she defined the French government-in-exile in London, during the Second World War, as 'a spiritual mission before being a military and political one.' (213). In The Need for Roots, written for that mission in preparation for the end of the war and the liberation of France, Weil tried to how what this 'spiritual mission' might mean for a government attentive to the true needs of its people. What she had to say—about the role of rights and the hierarchy of needs, about the difference between loyalty to the State and love of country, and about the role of science—was original and still has much to offer, to this day, to progressive thought. It holds particular interest for those progressives who are uneasy about the influence of religious thought in political life, but also confounded by the challenge, also the imperative, of articulating a humane vision of progressive value and purpose.

What makes an impression first is the distinction drawn by Weil between rights and obligations. Weil did not dispute the significance of rights, but she put them, it might be said, in their place. She viewed rights as 'subordinate and relative' to obligations: the exercise of a right did not depend on the demands of the individual possessing them, but on the recognition by others of their obligations....

...Weil insists that a progressive concerned with the promotion of just order must be able to speak about more than economic advancement, the expansion of rights, or the pursuit of individual happiness through restless scientific advance.  Weil believed that progressives need to speak, too, to the need for 'roots,' understood as a basic—even spiritual—need. They should be able to speak of love of country, not only of submission to the State. Their language should be that of obligation, not only of rights, informed by morality even before it appeals to law...." (from book review by Bob Bauer on More Soft Money Hard Law website)

BOOK REVIEW
T. S. Elliot
"This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their lesiure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed; books the effect of which, we can only hope, will become apparent in the attitude of mind of another generation."