Totalitarianism in the Work of Simone Weil: Insights from an Early Confrontation

Abstract

Simone Adolphine Weil initially saw herself as a Marxist and anarchist and became involved in revolutionary-syndicalist trade unions before increasingly becoming their early and extremely sharp critic. From 1933 onward, she distanced herself more and more from the syndicalist movement in terms of content, and at the same time she was increasingly skeptical of its politics. She saw in the syndicalists, socialists and communists no more accurate knowledge of society than in the conservatives or fascists. This led her very early on to the concept of totalitarianism, which appeared in her philosophy and only became widespread in Western societies after World War II, when Weil was already dead. Although Weil's concept of totalitarianism has been referred to in various essays, it has not yet been researched in her complete works. This article attempts for the first time to capture the concept of totalitarianism in Simone Weil's work, which was ahead of its time, and at the same time to group it systematically. The reader will thus be able to trace it in the various writings and recognize for the first time in how many different variations it found its way into Weil's oeuvre.