Weil was writing from exile in England, as her homeland was still under Nazi occupation. She saw National Socialism’s perversion and capture of the notion of rootedness, and the evil that was being done with it. But unlike many intellectuals of the left, the Nazis’ racial tyranny did not lead her to reject the notion of rootedness in favour of some universalist flavour of ‘global justice’. She saw that for the perfectionism it was: the same flavour of perfectionism that, to the east, was leading the USSR to roll out the same kind of tyranny as the Nazis were building, right down to the barbed
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