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A review by therealesioan
The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind by Simone Weil
4.0
TS Eliot's preface summed up the book pretty well. Where Weil is strongest is in her criticism of the rootlessness in modern europe, and how the Left and the Right have failed to offer an antidote. Much of the progressive left can never truly be SOCIAList because it actually hates society, it is inherently anti-social. You can't have a collective labour movement with a hatred for all of what binds people together (the nation, patriotism, religion, etc). But similarly you can't have be a conservative while holding onto global capitalism. The rootlessness that free trade and globalization enforces destroys tradition, hierarchy, identity, etc.
Her analysis of France's defeat against the Germans was quite interesting too. She seems to fall into a similar tradition within the leftists of the French Resistance as Jacques Ellul. I think the rapidness of France's fall forced many thinkers into considering the need for a palingenesis (or at least an intellectual one). Many of these Leftist thinkers like Weil and Ellul moved heavily toward radical Christian (usually Catholic) thought, being heavily critical of technology and modernization.
In this sense I think Weil fits very nicely into the socially conservative economically socialist communitarian school of Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry and (with less of an emphasis on socialist) Patrick J Deneen. I'm surprised those authors don't reference Weil more actually. The critique of both sides of the false dialectic is here, the critique of technology, globalism, etc.
Regardless, an excellent read, if a tad soft at times. Nice quote:
"Even without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness. In all parts of our country at the present time there are two poisons at work spreading this disease. One of them is money. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures."
Her analysis of France's defeat against the Germans was quite interesting too. She seems to fall into a similar tradition within the leftists of the French Resistance as Jacques Ellul. I think the rapidness of France's fall forced many thinkers into considering the need for a palingenesis (or at least an intellectual one). Many of these Leftist thinkers like Weil and Ellul moved heavily toward radical Christian (usually Catholic) thought, being heavily critical of technology and modernization.
In this sense I think Weil fits very nicely into the socially conservative economically socialist communitarian school of Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Wendell Berry and (with less of an emphasis on socialist) Patrick J Deneen. I'm surprised those authors don't reference Weil more actually. The critique of both sides of the false dialectic is here, the critique of technology, globalism, etc.
Regardless, an excellent read, if a tad soft at times. Nice quote:
"Even without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness. In all parts of our country at the present time there are two poisons at work spreading this disease. One of them is money. Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures."