Need for Roots

Simone Weil (Author) Simone Weil (1909-43) was a French political activist, mystic and a singular figure in French philosophy. She studied at the elite École Normale Supérieure, obtained her agrégation (teaching diploma) in philosophy in 1931, worked at Renault from 1934 to 1935, enlisted in the International Brigades in 1936 and worked as a farm labourer in 1941. She left France in 1942 for New York and then London, where she worked for General de Gaulle's Free French movement. Most of her works, published posthumously, consist of some notebooks and a collection of religious essays. They include, in English, Waiting for God (1951), Gravity and Grace (1952), The Need for Roots (1952), Notebooks (two volumes, 1956), Oppression and Liberty (1958) and Selected Essays, 1934-1943 (1962).Kate Kirkpatrick (Introducer) Kate Kirkpatrick is Fellow in Philosophy at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford. She is the author of several books and articles on twentieth-century French philosophy, including Sartre on Sin: Between Being and Nothingness (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sartre and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2017), and the internationally acclaimed biography of Simone de Beauvoir, Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (Bloomsbury, 2019).

A masterpiece … Today it retains an eerie prescience. Looking to the past, Weil spoke to future generations who would feel, as she did, that history is a trap we only half understand … luminous