Simone Weil Quotes on Politics
Weil's political philosophy is inseparable from her religious thought and her brief experience of factory labor. The Need for Roots, written for the Free French in 1943, diagnoses the deracination of modern industrial society and proposes a politics organized around the soul's needs — order, liberty, obedience, responsibility, equality, hierarchy, honor, security — needs as fundamental as the needs of the body. The earlier Reflections on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression and the essays on the Iliad develop a sustained critique of force as the principal political reality and of the modern state as a mechanism of impersonal coercion to which both fascism and bureaucratic socialism are vulnerable.
Quotes
-
“Liberty, taking the word in its concrete sense, consists in the ability to choose.”
Ch. 3, Liberty -
Attributed to Simone Weil:
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”
-
“The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees”
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts : to construct and to refrain from destruction . -
“The prospects of revolution seem therefore quite restricted. For can a revolution avoid war ? It is, however, on this feeble chance that we must stake everything or abandon all hope . An advanced country will not encounter, in the case of revolution, the difficulties which in backward Russia served as a base for the barbarous regime of Stalin . But a war of any scope will give rise to others as formidable.”
Reflections on War" (1933); also in Formative Writings (2009) -
“Reflections on War" (1933); also in Formative Writings (2009)”
The prospects of revolution seem therefore quite restricted. For can a revolution avoid war ? It is, however, on this feeble chance that we must stake everything or abandon all hope . An advanced country will not encounter, in the case of revolution, the difficulties which in backward Russia served as a base for the barbarous regime of Stalin . But a war of any scope will give rise to others as fo