Abstract
This chapter provides a brief overview of Simone Weil’s complex relationship to politics and ideology, via a discussion of her lifelong sociopolitical engagement and her rich reflections on key modern ideologies. The chapter argues that Weil does not fit comfortably within any single ideological tradition and that it is precisely her unclassifiable nature, combined with her sharp criticisms of the political, that makes her work such a fruitful object of study for contemporary political philosophy. The second part of the chapter briefly introduces the contributions of the volume.
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Notes
- 1.
See “Hannah Arendt on Hannah Arendt”, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvin Hill (New York: St-Martin’s Press, 1979), 333–334.
- 2.
Had she done so, Weil’s stern answer would certainly not have indicated a lack of concern for the world of politics, but rather the very opposite—an observation equally applicable to Arendt. Not surprisingly, numerous studies have put these two authors in conversation. E.g. Modernité, Démocratie et Totalitarisme: Simone Weil et Hannah Arendt, ed. Marina Cedronio (Paris: Kincksieck, 1996); Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, Three Women in Dark Times: Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Deborah Nelson, Tough Enough: Arbus, Arendt, Didion, McCarthy, Sontag, Weil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Roberto Esposito, The Origin of the Political: Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).
- 3.
See Simone Weil On Colonialism. An Ethic of the Other, ed. and trans. J.P. Little (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 10; also Gilles Manceron, “Réflexions sur l’anticolonialisme de Simone Weil”, Cahiers Simone Weil XXXVII, no. 1 (March 2014); Inese Radzins, “Simone Weil’s Social Philosophy: Toward a Post-Colonial Ethic”, in New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion, ed. P.S. Anderson (New York: Springer, 2009). Readers will here be offered a detailed treatment of Weil’s relation to colonialism in Benjamin P. Davis’ contribution (see chapter 6 in this volume).
- 4.
A detailed treatment of Weil’s engagement with Marxism and Marxists can be found in Lawrence A. Blum and Victor J. Seidler, A Truer Liberty: Simone Weil and Marxism (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). Cf. Robert Sparling, “Theory and Praxis: Simone Weil and Marx on the Dignity of Labor,” The Review of Politics 74, no. 1 (2012).
- 5.
Simone Pétrement, Simone Weil: A Life, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 46.
- 6.
Ibid., 47.
- 7.
Ibid., 120.
- 8.
Weil was a member of the United Federation of Teachers, as well as an elected member of the trade union teachers’ council when she taught in Le Puy during the 1931–1932 school year. Ibid., 119–120.
- 9.
Ibid., 118.
- 10.
She describes this shift in a letter to her friends Urbain and Albertine Thévenon. See Weil, Simone Weil. Oeuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1999), 53.
- 11.
Weil quotes Trotsky here. Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (New York, London: Routledge, 2006), 4.
- 12.
Ibid., 9.
- 13.
Ibid., 17. Readers should also see Weil’s “Reflections Concerning Technocracy, National-Socialism, the U.S.S.R. and Certain Other Matters”, in Oppression and Liberty.
- 14.
Ibid., 18.
- 15.
Ibid., 19. On Weil and socialism, see Louis Patsouras, Simone Weil and the Socialist Tradition (San Francisco: EMText, 1992).
- 16.
An excerpt of Trotsky’s reaction was published in La Vérité and is quoted in Pétrement, Simone Weil, 178.
- 17.
Ibid., 188.
- 18.
Plato, The Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), 493a-d. Weil wrote that: “The whole of Marxism, in so far as it is true, is contained in the page of Plato on the Great Beast; and its refutation is there too.” Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 124.
- 19.
See Rozelle-Stone’s chapter in this volume for a discussion of one of the places where Weil parted ways with her teacher Alain: namely, around the question of happiness.
- 20.
Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, trans. Hugh Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 152. Casey Ford in this volume (ch. 9) considers several dimensions of Weil’s critique of the State.
- 21.
See Weil, Oppression and Liberty, trans. Arthur Wills and John Petrie (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 102.
- 22.
Mary G. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine. The Political Thought of Simone Weil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988), 38. Compare with the treatments offered by Scott B. Ritner (ch. 10) and by Suzanne McCullagh (ch. 11) in this volume.
- 23.
Blum and Seidler, A Truer Liberty, p.xi. David McLellan reads Weil as an insightful critic of liberalism and as a friend of contemporary communitarians in “Simone Weil et la philosophie politique libérale contemporaine,” Cahiers Simone Weil XXII, no. 2 (June 1999). Eric O. Springsted (in this volume, chapter two) offers a detailed treatment of the resonances between Weil and communitarian political theorist Michael Sandel.
- 24.
Weil, Oeuvres, 64.
- 25.
André A. Devaux, “Préface” to Simone Weil. Oeuvres Complètes 1, Premiers écrits philosophiques, ed. Gilbert Kahn and Rolf Kühn (Paris: Gallimard, 1988, 15).
- 26.
Robert Chenavier, Simone Weil. Attention to the Real, trans. Bernard E. Doering (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). On manual work’s great significance for Weil, see e.g. Inese Radzins, “Simone Weil on Labor and Spirit,” Journal of Religious Ethics 45, no. 2 (2017); Sparling, “Theory and Praxis”. The most comprehensive treatment remains Robert Chenavier, Simone Weil. Une philosophie du travail (Paris: Cerf, 2001).
- 27.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 25.
- 28.
Weil remained a pacifist up until March of 1939, when Hitler violated the Munich Agreement and annexed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Weil would deeply regret this pacifism, which she would later describe as her “criminal error”. Weil, First and Last Notebooks. Supernatural Knowledge, trans. Richard Rees (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015), 345.
- 29.
Her rapid departure was hence not the result of a sudden disillusionment with the Spanish anarchist cause. Nonetheless, as many Weil scholars have noted, Weil’s anarchist “sympathies” progressively dwindled with time. According to A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Benjamin P. Davis, for instance, Weil’s London writings are “markedly different from her early writings as an anarchist informed principally by Descartes, Marx, and Kant. While those influences remain, her later writings must be read through the lens of her Christian Platonism.” https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simone-weil/.
- 30.
Weil, Waiting for God, 32.
- 31.
Ibid., 33.
- 32.
Ibid., 34.
- 33.
Philippe Dujardin, Simone Weil. Idéologie et politique (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1975), 152.
- 34.
Ibid., 169.
- 35.
Ibid., 170.
- 36.
In her “Reflections concerning the causes of liberty and social oppression”, she clearly expresses her deep concern for the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe. In her view, there was an “appearance of ‘totalitarian’ régimes unprecedented in history”. See Weil, Oppression and Liberty, 112; also 129 and 152–154.
- 37.
Weil, Waiting for God, 37. See Weil, On the Abolition of All Political Parties, trans. Simon Leys (New York: New York Review Books, 2013), 27. Readers should also see Julie Daigle’s chapter in this volume (ch. 12), which discusses Weil’s criticisms of parties.
- 38.
Pétrement, Simone Weil, 533.
- 39.
“The Supernatural as a Remedy to Totalitarian Regimes: Simone Weil on Sanctity and the Eucharist,” in A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone and Lucian W. Stone, eds., The Relevance of the Radical: Simone Weil 100 Years Later (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), 44–45. In this volume, Alexandra Féret (ch. 8) offers a detailed analysis of Weil’s account of idolatry.
- 40.
Ibid., 46.
- 41.
Weil, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 151.
- 42.
Daniel Lindenberg, “Politique de Simone Weil,” Esprit 8/9 (August-Sept. 2012), 48. Consider the following passage from Weil’s notebooks (key for Lindenberg’s reading): « No liberalism (say why) – no totalitarianism (say why) – something inhuman.” Weil, Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres, 173. (Translation ours.).
- 43.
This speaks in part to what is proposed by Scott Ritner in this volume (ch. 10): namely, that Weil embraced a ‘revolutionary pessimism’ (i.e. a radical politics of resistance, but resistance “without hope” (Ritner’s terms)). For one book-length reading of Weil as an idiosyncratic type of pessimist, see David McLellan, Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil (New York: Poseidon Press, 1990).
- 44.
Weil, Écrits de Londres, 151.
- 45.
Rozelle-Stone and Stone, The Relevance, p. xxv.
- 46.
Notable exceptions include Mary G. Dietz, Between the Human and the Divine, and E. Jane Doering’s Simone Weil and the Specter of Self-Perpetuating Force (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).
- 47.
For French scholarship, think of the work of Christine Delsol; Philippe Riviale; Valérie Gérard; Pascale Devette and Étienne Tassin; Bertrand Saint-Sernin (please see our bibliography for complete references). For the Anglo-Saxon world, see e.g. the work of A. Rebecca Rozelle-Stone (including her recent Simone Weil and Continental Philosophy). The Italian scholarly scene has also witnessed a great rise in interest for Weil’s political thought. For book-length treatments translated in English, see most notably Roberto Esposito, The Origin of the Political, and Categories of the Impolitical, trans. Connal Parsley (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
- 48.
Naturally, previous edited volumes have sometimes included some contributions that explored parts of Weil’s political philosophy. See e.g. Diogenes Allen and Eric O. Springsted eds., Spirit, Nature and Community: Issues in the Thought of Simone Weil (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994); Richard Bell ed. Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture. Readings Toward a Divine Humanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 49.
See most notably the chapters of Rozelle-Stone and Davis.
- 50.
The concept has been the object of much scholarship over the years. One recent and very rich treatment can be found in Yoon Sook Cha, Decreation and the Ethical Bind (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). On Weil and Agamben, readers should see Alessia Ricciardi, “From Decreation to Bare Life: Weil, Agamben, and the Impolitical,” Diacritics 39, no. 2 (2009).
- 51.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, “The Vexation of Simone Weil”, in Power Trips and Other Journeys (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 23.
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Bourgault, S., Daigle, J. (2020). Introduction: Weil, Politics and Ideology. In: Bourgault, S., Daigle, J. (eds) Simone Weil, Beyond Ideology?. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48401-9_1
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