The Need for Roots

⚖The case for it

The fault is real: the closing chapters harden into rules no free country would accept, and she is not joking. What holds is the order of her questions. Weil refuses to discuss what people are owed until she has settled what they owe, and only then does she name what a soul starves without: order, obedience, honour, a stake in the work that feeds it. She had spent a year in the factories by then, taking leave from her teaching post to do work she was clumsy at and exhausted by, and that year has not let go of her. You will argue with her the whole way through. Keep reading.

— the honest librarian

✕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

6h

honest hours

9

sittings