El arraigo : Preludio a una declaración de deberes para con los seres humanos

Between 1942 and 1943, Simone Weil collaborated with the French Resistance on an endeavor that would rebuild Europe from its philosophical and moral ruins: the drafting of a new Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To this end, Weil focused on a fundamental discovery: duties precede rights. The obligation to respect the needs that all human beings share is what guarantees the freedom and joy that must underpin a civilization oriented toward good. And among these needs, "rootedness is perhaps the most important and unknown need of the human soul." To be rooted means to live in connection with a community, a past and traditions, an idea of ​​nature and beauty, and especially with a spirituality that defuses the destructive passions that lead us to see others as enemies: there is an "eternal destiny" that unites us, which is nothing other than the respect we all owe one another. Conversely, uprootedness is "the most dangerous disease of human societies," and those who suffer from it often also cause it. This edition, with a prologue by Carmen Herrando Cugota, includes supplementary texts from "Study of a Declaration of Obligations Towards Human Beings," offering a comprehensive view of a thought that, as Albert Camus recognized, is essential to imagining any European renaissance.