Moral Patriotism in an Unholy Nation: Simone Weil against Populist Nationalism

• In Event: Resisting Fascism

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of Simone Weil’s political thought in The Need for Roots. It argues that Weil paradoxically raises the standards of realist political action in the face of raised political stakes—particularly the rise of populist and fascist movements in an ideologically fraught Western world—by instrumentalizing wartime patriotism for grander moral-ethical aims. How to the people of a nation become inspired towards political action, and liberating political action in particular? This question motivates Weil’s inquiry and political thought in The Need for Roots. Published posthumously after World War II but written in the early months of 1943, The Need for Roots offers Weil’s diagnosis of political catastrophe in light of the German defeat of France in 1940. She calls the problem “uprootedness” and theorizes how France might regrow its roots. Weil believes that the primary cause of uprootedness is the displacement of the nation with “the State,” which demands a national “loyalty” or “idolatry” and erodes justice-seeking within the nation. Uprootedness is a tenuous condition, not in the least because it tends to be self-perpetuating. The remedy for uprootedness, what Weil calls “growing roots,” requires balancing a number of delicate tensions. A people can grow their roots by reorienting their view of their country’s past, by locating appropriate motives to inspire political action, and by developing a reimagined love of country. All of these tasks are most achievable during a time of war. Yet all of them must be done without falling into the trap of idolizing the State, worshipping the glory that leads to domination, or loving anything other than justice and the good. Though Weil’s work is broadly political and theological rather than polemical, Weil’s diagnosis of “uprootedness” and suggestions for “growing roots” engage questions related to political consciousness and education and how they inform political action, the ethics of political means and ends, and the transformative power of becoming politically awakened. Furthermore, the perils of “uprootedness” and of “growing roots” are the very attitudes, dispositions, and beliefs that lead to populist nationalistic movements. Greatness, narratives of one’s country’s past, and patriotic love of country can each devolve into State idolatry in a way that mirrors how populist nationalism led to fascism in Nazi Germany.
Weil strikes the core of tensions in political thought responding to fascism—not only as such tensions relate to the particular context of Nazi-occupied France at the time of her writing The Need for Roots but also as they relate to larger questions of morality, obligation, and political action. This paper attempts to understand how, in The Need for Roots, Weil navigates the tension between forming a patriotic political consciousness that has the power to inspire liberating political action and developing an attitude of populist nationalism that feeds the power of the State, further uprooting oneself rather than “growing” roots. On my reading, this tension remains largely unresolved. Mary Dietz gives some attention to it in Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil, but the scope of that book is broad, and her ambition to unify the political and spiritual threads in Weil’s thought sometimes precludes Dietz from giving full attention to Weil’s precise navigation between a moral, reimagined version of nationalism and an uprooting, populist one.
This is not to say that Weil’s account of politics is confused or wrought with contradiction. That Weil attempts to resolve tensions other theorists might deem irreconcilable speaks to the creativity and ambition of her work. She is at least as daring as Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work holds many of the same concerns as Weil’s. Throughout this paper, I discuss Niebuhr’s political and moral thought as he expresses it in Moral Man and Immoral Society to offer a relevant point of comparison. Indeed, Niebuhr often offers a powerful juxtaposition to Weil: both are concerned about moral erosion in modern society, particularly with regards to justice, about the rise of the modern state as an absolute, about patriotism that becomes blind love or “idolatry,” about the relationship between the individual and the collective, about how the collective might overcome socio-political ills that obstruct the path to justice, and about the particular conditions of wartime that spur moral political action.

Author

• Isabelle Laurenzi, Yale University