The Need for Roots

The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (French: L'Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l'être humain) is a book by Simone Weil. After Weil's death, her parents asked her close friend Boris Souvarine to publish her work under the title "Prelude to a Declaration of Obligations towards the Human Being." In 1949, it appeared in publisher Gallimard’s Espoir collection, edited by Albert Camus, under the title "L’Enracinement". The first English translation was published in 1952.

The work diagnoses the causes of the social, cultural, and spiritual malaise which Weil saw as afflicting 20th-century civilisation, particularly Europe, but also the rest of the world. Weil supports a significant cultural shift, stating that order means society requires a web of social relations where no one must violate an obligation to fulfill another obligation. Weil examines what she calls 'Uprootedness', defined as a near-universal condition resulting from the destruction of ties with the past and the dissolution of community. Weil specifies the requirements that must be met so that peoples can once again feel rooted, in a cultural and spiritual sense, to their environment, to their labour, and to both the past and to expectations for the future. The book discusses the political, cultural, and spiritual currents that ought to be nurtured so that people have access to sources of energy that will help them lead fulfilling, joyful, and morally good lives. A leading theme is the need to recognize the spiritual nature of work.

The Need for Roots is regarded as Weil's best-known work and has provoked a variety of responses, from being described as a work of "exceptional originality and breadth of human sympathy" to "a collection of egregious nonsense."