Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought

Hellman, John

ISBN 10: 0889201218 / ISBN 13: 9780889201217

Published by Waterloo, ON : Wilfried Laurier University Press, 1982

About this Item

Original hardcover, 8vo.

Seller Inventory # 356046-ZD14

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Simone Weil: An Introduction to Her Thought
• Publisher: Waterloo, ON : Wilfried Laurier University Press
• Publication Date: 1982
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0889201218
• ISBN 13: 9780889201217
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

"The generation of 1930 in French intellectual life was unique in the gravity of the challenges they faced." Simone Weil--the brilliant social and political theorist, activist, and spiritual writer--was one of an eminent company in the France of the 1930s who responded to these challenges. In her brief, remarkable life she wrote a host of essays and letters and filled several notebooks with reflections. Hellman's volume sets out the single world view--with its paradoxes and its logic--which appears behind her disparate writings but which she never lived to set out formally herself. Hellman extracts the key themes in Weil's writings on Marxism, Hitlerism, factory work, history, and religion, in an effort to examine the seeming contradictions and inconsistencies in her fusion of deep spirituality and commitment to the poor and oppressed and her love-hate relationship with Roman Catholicism and Israel. The result is a synthesis of her thought as a whole, drawn principally from her varied, fragmentary writings, and seen in relation to her life and personality.

About the Author

John Hellman, a member of the History Department at McGill University, is an associate editor of Cross Currents and the author of Emmanuel Mounier and the New Catholic Left, 1930-1950 and of articles on modern European intellectual, political, and religious history. He holds the Ph.D. degree from Harvard University.