The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind

IN HIS preface, T. S. Eliot recommends a slow and careful reading: “what matters is to make contact with a great soul.” Asked by the Free French in London to write a report on the possibility of regeneration in France after World War II, Weil wrote this book—considered by many to be her most well-balanced and intellectually persuasive—calling on her fellow countrymen to begin recovering their spiritual roots. At the core of her thought is the centrality of physical labor in establishing and developing spiritual solvency. Both social stability and a well-ordered life depend not only on the body’s exertion but also on a people “accustomed to love truth.” Eliot categorizes Weil’s work as a “prolegomena to politics which politicians seldom read,” exhorting the young to study it “before their leisure has been lost and their capacity for thought destroyed.” We concur and offer Weil to close: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

Preface by T. S. Eliot
298 pp. paper $19.95

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