The Need for Roots

Common card · No. 337623

The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (French: L'Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain) is a book by Simone Weil. After Weil's death, her parents asked her close friend Boris Souvarine to publish her work under the title "Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being." In 1949, it appeared in publisher Gallimard’s Espoir collection, edited by Albert Camus, under the title "L’Enracinement". The first English translation was published in 1952. The work diagnoses the causes of the social, cultural, and spiritual malaise which Weil saw as afflicting 20th-century civilisation, particularly Europe, but also the rest of the world. Weil supports a significant cultural shift, stating that order means society requires a web of social relations where no one must violate an obligation to fulfill another obligation. Weil examines what she calls 'Uprootedness', defined as a near-universal condition resulting from the...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Simone Weil, Gallimard, Public domain