The Need for Roots

⚖The case for it

Asked by the Free French in 1943 for a report on rebuilding France after liberation, Weil handed back a diagnosis of the modern soul: uprootedness is the disease, and obligations come before rights. She was dead by August, thirty-four, tuberculosis and a refusal to eat more than the rations allowed in occupied France. Eliot introduced the English edition as the work of a genius akin to the saints.

— the canon

✕The case against

The diagnosis is immortal; the prescriptions are alarming. Weil would abolish political parties and haul lying journalists before special tribunals, and de Gaulle read her London memos and pronounced her mad. The mysticism and the sociology never quite agree on who is in charge, and she revised nothing — it is a draft, written at speed by a dying woman, and it reads like one. Come for the anatomy of uprootedness; handle the cure with gloves.

— the honest librarian