Posthumous work · Essential works
The Need for Roots
L'Enracinement. Prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain
It starts from a principle: obligation precedes right. The first part lists the 'needs of the soul' (order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honour, punishment, freedom of opinion, security, risk, property, truth…); the second analyses the uprootedness of workers, peasants and nations; the third sketches how to give a people roots again through education and work with a spiritual meaning. It is her major political work and a radical critique both of the modern state and of the cult of greatness.
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Authorship note
Written in London between January and April 1943 as a report for Free France; it remained unfinished. Albert Camus published it in 1949 in Gallimard's 'Espoir' series.
Editions and translations
Editions in your language first, without hiding the others. Each with its cover and its store.
English
Simone Weil
The Need for Roots
The Conscious LibraryThe Need for Roots
Penguin Classics, 2023
Translation: Ros Schwartz
ISBN 9780141994192
The Need for Roots
Routledge (Routledge Classics), 2001
Translation: Arthur Wills
ISBN 9780415271028
Prefacio de T. S. Eliot.
Français
Español
Echar raíces
Trotta, 1997
Translation: Juan Ramón Capella
ISBN 9788481641233
Echar raíces
Trotta, 2014
Translation: Juan Ramón Capella
ISBN 9788498795325
Other works by Simone Weil
- Gravity and Grace · 1947
- Waiting for God · 1950
- Notebooks · 1951
- First and Last Notebooks (Supernatural Knowledge) · 1950
- Reflections concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression · 1934
- Oppression and Liberty · 1955
- The Worker's Condition (La Condition ouvrière) · 1951
- Factory Journal · 1935
- The Iliad, or the Poem of Force · 1940
- The Greek Source · 1953
- Intimations of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks · 1951
- Letter to a Priest · 1951
- London Writings and Last Letters · 1957
- Human Personality (The Person and the Sacred) · 1943
- On the Abolition of All Political Parties · 1943
- Draft for a Statement of Human Obligations · 1943
- Project for a Formation of Front-Line Nurses · 1940
- Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God · 1942
- The Love of God and Affliction · 1942
- Forms of the Implicit Love of God · 1942
- Spiritual Autobiography · 1942
- Unordered Thoughts on the Love of God · 1962
- Lectures on Philosophy · 1959
- Science and Perception in Descartes · 1930
- On Science · 1966
- Historical and Political Writings · 1960
- Letter to Georges Bernanos · 1938
- Let Us Not Start the Trojan War Again · 1937
- Venice Saved · 1955
- Poems · 1968
- Correspondence · 1982
- Complete Works · 1988
Sources
- Weil, Simone. L'Enracinement: prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain. Paris: Gallimard (col. «Espoir»), 1949. Texto en Wikisource.
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