The Need for Roots

Simone Weil's last book, written in London in 1943 for the Free French, who had asked her for ideas on how France might be rebuilt after the war. It was published in 1949 in a series edited by Albert Camus. Weil begins by arguing that obligations come before rights: a right means nothing unless someone recognises an obligation to honour it, and every human being is owed respect simply as a human being. She then lists the needs of the soul that a just society must meet, among them order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honour, security and risk, private and collective property, and truth. The long second part diagnoses uprootedness, the loss of a living connection to a community, a place and a past, among factory workers, among peasants and in the French nation, criticising a patriotism built on state power and conquest. The third part asks how roots might be regrown, and places physical labour at the spiritual centre of a renewed society.

It is a rare work of political philosophy built on duties and human needs rather than rights, and its account of uprootedness speaks directly to questions of work, migration and belonging.