Simone Weil: An Introduction

In her brilliant exposition of Simone Weil’s thought, Mary Dietz categorised Simone Weil as a thinker “who remains widely unexamined, perhaps even ignored … despite thought provoking, masterful, even extraordinary work” (Dietz 1988: 1). Twenty-six years later, this still holds true. Simone Weil is a writer whose philosophy and thought remain relatively unknown in the discipline of political science, and absolutely unknown in the subfield of International Relations.¹ Why this is so can be potentially attributed to a host of reasons, first among them her spiritual experiences in the 1930s that brought an impassioned Christian mysticism to her thought. This mysticism, when combined with her exacting commitment to a stringent way of being, and the tragedy of her early death, lends itself to a misguided dismissal of her thought as “other-worldly”, “anti-political”, or “merely mystical”. Yet, in thought and in deed Simone Weil was fundamentally engaged in, and constantly struggling to make sense of, the world in which she lived. As Dietz (1988: 31) so eloquently delineates, Simone Weil’s writings consider “the meaning of individual freedom in the modern collectivity, the nature of community in the nation state, and the political and social possibilities for an end to the affliction and oppression of the human condition”.