The Need for Roots

Written in London in 1943 and first published in French in 1949, The Need for Roots is Simone Weil’s searching meditation on the spiritual and political foundations of a humane society. Composed during the Second World War for the Free French movement, it asks what people need in order to live with dignity, and what obligations individuals and governments owe one another. Weil examines the fifteen needs of the soul, including freedom, responsibility, equality, honour and rootedness, before turning to the social and cultural forces that leave people estranged from their communities, their work and their past.

Moving between political philosophy, ethics and spiritual reflection, Weil argues that a just society must nourish the inner life as carefully as it provides for material needs. Her reflections on labour, education, patriotism and the preservation of cultural memory remain strikingly relevant to questions of belonging and collective responsibility. Published posthumously, with an influential preface by T. S. Eliot in its English edition, the book stands among her most ambitious and enduring works: an exacting vision of how society might be rebuilt around human dignity rather than power.

From the book

“A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.”

— Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

On The Need for Roots

“Today it retains an eerie prescience.”

— Madoc Cairns, The Times Literary Supplement