The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots is a work by the French philosopher Simone Weil, written in 1943 and published posthumously in 1949 by Albert Camus in Gallimard's «Espoir» collection. Its full original title was «Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind», and the manuscript was left unfinished. Weil wrote it during the final months of her life, while working in London for the services of Free France, at a time when the reconstruction of the country after the war was being prepared. The text began as a report commissioned by the French resistance movement on the possibilities of regenerating France once the Germans had been driven back, and it was submitted together with a shorter essay on human obligations.

The book diagnoses the causes of the social, cultural and spiritual malaise that Weil saw afflicting twentieth-century civilisation, especially Europe, though not only there. Its central concept is «uprootedness», a near-universal condition produced by the severing of ties with the past and the dissolution of community. Against it, Weil sets out the conditions under which peoples might again feel rooted, culturally and spiritually, in their surroundings, in their work, and in both the past and the hopes of the future. To that end she examines the political, cultural and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people can draw on sources of energy that allow them to live full, joyful and morally good lives.

Her argument rests on a philosophical foundation: the idea of an absolute or total good, present in human conscience. Weil holds that moral obligations are more fundamental than rights, since a right only has meaning when others fulfil the obligation to respect it, and that obligations are universal and independent of circumstance. From this basis she distinguishes physical needs from «needs of the soul», and devotes much of the book to fourteen of the latter. A recurring theme is the recognition of the spiritual nature of work, a concept Weil regarded as the great original idea of the West and which she drew from her own experience as a factory worker and agricultural labourer.

The work has provoked widely varying responses, from those who have praised its «exceptional originality and breadth of human sympathy» to those who have dismissed it as a collection of nonsense. T. S. Eliot welcomed it as a prolegomenon to politics that politicians seldom read, and many later readers have stressed its anticipatory character in the face of the disorders of the twentieth century and its continued relevance for thinking about community and labour.