Simone Weil: A Thinker for Our Trying Times
Book Review Excerpt: “A good number of biographies have been penned about Weil since her death in 1943, a few quite recently. Now, wishing to cull from her work ideas most relevant to our times, intellectual historian Robert Zaretsky has written yet another: The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. The five ideas Zaretsky draws out in as many chapters are: the force of affliction; paying attention; the varieties of resistance; finding roots; and the good, the bad, and the Godly. The first three chapters are strong, as Zaretsky’s deftly situates Weil in historical, literary, and philosophical context. In the third chapter on resistance, the best of the book, we find, for instance, a riveting account of how Weil’s engagement in both the Spanish Civil War and World War II dramatically transformed her from a committed pacifist to one who would in time declare that the inaction of pacifists up and against Hitler’s violent advance betrayed “a propensity to treason. . . .”
Source: Law & Liberty (Feb. 3, 2022)
Erika Bachiochi is a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute where she founded and directs the Wollstonecraft Project. Her new book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, was published by Notre Dame Press in 2021.