The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (Routledge Classics) - Softcover

Weil, Simone

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9780415119597: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (Routledge Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0415119596 ISBN 13: 9780415119597

Publisher: Routledge, 1978

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First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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From the Back Cover:

'This is one of those books which ought to be studied by the young before their leisure 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.' - T.S. Eliot

Hailed by Andri 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'.

Synopsis:

Written while Simone Weil worked at the French Headquarters in London, The Need for Roots was published posthumously under the title L'Enracinement , in 1949. She had been commissioned by General de Gaulle, head of the Free French forces, to write a report on the duties and privileges of the French after the liberation. An intensely spiritual person, Simone Weil felt it an obligation to experience life as others had to, working in factories and on farms. She became concerned by the idea of uprootedness and, in this report, called on her fellow French to recover their spiritual roots, stressing the need for security. She was to die of tuberculosis a year after being commissioned to write The Need for Roots , having refused to eat more than the rations of those suffering Nazi occupation in France.

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