Simone Weil: History and Nation

Having deployed in her last work, L’Enracinement, (The Need for Roots), such concepts as nation, history, homeland, and tradition, Simone Weil’s thinking could be interpreted as shifting rightward. Yet, close reading of the text demonstrates that she retains a critical distance from the conception of history as a predetermined process, as promoted by totalitarian regimes of the left and right, where human beings become powerless cogs in a social machine; devoid of autonomy, and completely subordinate to the idea of progress. By contrast, within her version of civic nationalism, history is expressed as an open-ended project, where the individual can exercise autonomy rooted within a specific social and cultural milieu.