page_title: The Need for Roots
section_title: Assessment and reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Need for Roots / Assessment and reception
caption_attribution_description: WWII French General Charles De Gaulle A WWII photo portrait of General Charles de Gaulle of the Free French Forces and first president of the Fifth Republic serving from 1959 to 1969.
context_page_description: The Need for Roots: prelude towards a declaration of duties towards mankind is a book by Simone Weil. It was first published in French in 1949, titled L'Enracinement. The first English translation was published in 1952. Like all of Weil's books it was published posthumously.
  The work diagnoses the causes of the social, cultural and spiritual malaise which Weil saw as afflicting 20th century civilisation, particularly Europe but also the rest of the world. 'Uprootedness' is defined as a near universal condition resulting from the destruction of ties with the past and the dissolution of community. Weil specifies the requirements that must be met so that peoples can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment and to both the past and to expectations for the future. The book discusses the political, cultural and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people have access to sources of energy which will help them lead fulfilling, joyful and morally good lives. A leading theme is the need to recognise the spiritual nature of work.
context_section_description: Weil's first English biographer Richard Rees has written that Need for Roots can be described as an investigation into the causes of unhappiness and proposals for its cure. Writing in 1966 he says it contains more of what the present age needs to understand and more of the criticism it needs to listen to than any other writer of the 20th century has been able to express.
  According to Dr Stephen Plant, writing in 1996, Need for Roots remains just as relevant today as it was in the 1940s when the majority of European workers were employed by heavy industry.T. S. Eliot praised the work's balanced judgement, shrewdness and good sense.
  The Times Literary Supplement wrote that the book is about politics in the "widest Aristotelian understanding of the term" and that is displayed "exceptional originality and breath of human sympathy".
  For Weil scholar Sian Miles the book is the most complete expression of Weil's social thought. 
  Albert Camus was so taken with the work he wrote it seemed to him "impossible to imagine the rebirth of Europe  without taking into consideration the suggestions outlined in it by Simone Weil."  
  General De Gaulle on the other hand was less impressed, dismissing  her recommendations and only half reading most of her reports.  For the most part very few of Weils idea's were put into practice during the operations that followed the liberation of France, with one of few direct signs of her influence being that a list of obligations was included along with a list of rights in a French free press release of August 1943. 
  Poet and critic Kenneth Rexroth took a negative view of the book, writing in 1957 that it "was a collection of egregious nonsense"  and "a weird, embarrassing relic of a too immediate past."
caption: General de Gaulle was Weil's ultimate boss in the Free French Movement, but he had little time for her work and refused to read the whole of Need for Roots
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