A wonderful collection that more people on goodreads should read. Weil really deserves to be as popular as the other 19th/20th century moralist-essayist-thinkers who left incomplete or fragmented works behind them (think: Nietzsche, Benjamin), but she has the real disadvantage of just saying what she means in a clear, concise way, rather than leaving thousands of hermeneutical puzzles for us to work through.

Not everything in here is perfect, of course, but the long essays, in particular, are great. 'Human Personality' suggests an alternative to human rights discourse, focusing more on justice and duties; Weil argues that these are more fitting, and I tend to agree with her. "Words like 'I have the right...' or 'you have no right to...'... evoke a latent war and awaken the spirit of contention. To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides." "What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium."

The best thing about Weil's thought, beside her ability to deal honestly with the largest themes, is her insistent dialecticising. She doesn't describe anything negatively without putting the argument for the opposite position (except for a slightly odd knee-jerk hatred of ancient Rome). Unlike almost everyone, she balances perfectly between demanding that the material needs of human beings must be met, and demanding that their spiritual (as in Geistlich, not new-age religion) development be attended to, as well.

'The Needs of the Soul' expands on the notion of obligations, and tries to suggest exactly what human beings need in order to be human. In short, Weil thinks: order, liberty (note, again, the dialectic here), obedience ("the men of our time have now for a long time been starved of obedience. But advantage has been taken of the fact to give them slavery"), responsibility, equality, hierarchism, social honour, punishment, freedom of opinion (but also censorship. "There has been a lot of freedom of thought over the past few years, but not thought"), security, risk, private property ("the principle of private property is violated where the land is worked by agricultural labourers and farm-hands under the orders of an estate-manager, and owned by townsmen who receive the profits"), collective property, and truth. Only in the case of truth is her analysis obviously flawed.

'Analysis of Oppression' has a valuable aim--to analyze oppression as concept, rather than the various kinds of oppression--but never even gets started on the task; Weil spends her time describing, e.g., Marx's analysis of capitalist oppression and trying to see how it can be used in a more general account, but that's as far as she gets.

Finally, her essay on the Iliad is solid, though perhaps wish-fulfilling rather than accurate, and 'The Power of Words' is a wonderful analysis of reification in language.

Thought-provoking stuff, clear, and full of great aphoristic turns. Highly recommended, provided you're not a militant atheist. ( )