The Need for Mobility

Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots was written in London in the early months of 1943 by a French woman who would never return home.1 At the time, France was occupied by Germany, and the Free French government-in-exile had asked Weil—a young and intensely bright philosopher and political activist—to prepare a report on how the country could be regenerated after its liberation. Weil threw herself into the task with characteristic fervor and, despite her declining health, finished the manuscript within a few months. She died of tuberculosis and cardiac failure shortly after, in August 1943, at the age of thirty-four. The report, published posthumously in 1949 under the title L’enracinement, is a document that—much like its author—defies easy classification. It is political philosophy, moral theology, and policy prescription all at once.

The book’s central orienting concept is, as the title suggests, roots. L’enracinement translates most literally as “rooting” or “taking root.” The English translation loses this active sense to emphasize the essence of Weil’s philosophical argument: that humans have a vital need to be rooted in place, community, and meaning. In France, that need was actively threatened by the German occupation—“uprootedness occurs whenever there is a military conquest,” Weil writes—but the faceless forces of modernity were equally to blame: “Even without a military conquest, money-power and economic domination can so impose a foreign influence as actually to provoke this disease of uprootedness.”2 France was sick, and the remedy Weil prescribed was to fundamentally rethink the nature of education, work, and governance so that the human need for rootedness, which she describes as “the most important and least recognized need of the human soul,” might be realized.3

Naturally, many who read The Need for Roots assume its focus is directed to the ties that bind people to place. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete.4 The work also contains within it an underappreciated theory of the need for mobility—one in which purposive movement across space and, perhaps more importantly, mind and spirit, is a precondition to true rootedness.

In this essay, I read Weil for her theory of mobility and its relation to her theory of rooting. In doing so, I suggest that the relationship between movement and rootedness—a subject that preoccupies migration scholars, sociologists of community, and anyone who has ever wondered whether to leave their home—is not the zero-sum contest it is often assumed to be. The need for roots and the need for mobility can instead be mutually constitutive when viewed across the full landscape of a human life.

Weil’s theory of mobility does not sit easily with contemporary discussions of “economic mobility” and “social mobility,” both of which tend to treat meaningful movement as climbing a hierarchy of income or status in a way that inherently devalues the occupations at its base. The mobility that Weil champions is not hierarchical, and in advancing a theory of mobility that complements rootedness, Weil poses a core challenge to modern societies: to learn how to revalue fundamental work. For Weil, meaningful mobility is movement across experiences, skills, places, and ways of knowing, undertaken freely and culminating not in ascent (or escape) but in a richer, more fully chosen form of rootedness in community.5

This essay proceeds in five parts. I begin with Weil’s definition of rootedness, which, despite the arboreal metaphor, is less dependent on permanently fixing oneself in place than one might imagine. I then turn to Weil’s proposal to revive the Tour de France—a centuries-old tradition of structured journeying for apprentice craftsmen and artisans—as the concrete form her theory of mobility takes. According to Weil, this deliberate movement in youth can ground a rootedness in adulthood that is chosen rather than inherited. The third section widens the field of view from spatial mobility to the intellectual and spiritual mobility that Weil cares most about, as well as to the reforms of education and work she believes it requires. I then search for traces of Weil’s vision that are alive today, before turning finally to what her arguments leave out. Throughout, my aim is to show that Weil offers something rare in contemporary debates about mobility and place: an account in which the need for roots and the need for mobility complement one another.

Weil’s Definition of Rootedness

Weil’s definition of “rootedness” entails embeddedness in place, but staying in place is hardly the point. Rather, Weil describes “to be rooted” as

The emphasis in this first definition is on participation in a community that connects valued aspects of the past with future expectations. That this participation is “active” implies genuine effort on the part of an individual to be part of a community; that it is “real” implies that it has some consequence and that the participant in turn is affected by their belonging in this community. It is “natural,” Weil elaborates, “in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings.”7 The natural condition thus assumes that people are formed within a particular community. As I will show, Weil’s theory of mobility tends to assume a return to that community. At the end of the essay, I consider how the migrant who does not or cannot return complicates this theory. But for now, let us see Weil’s core argument through on its own terms.

“Every human being needs to have multiple roots,” Weil continues. “It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”8 Staying in place is one kind of root, but it does not, in and of itself, make one rooted. From Weil’s perspective, a person can live in the same town for fifty years and be utterly uprooted if the community around them has been hollowed out by capitalist encroachment, by bureaucratic centralization, or by the materialism and alienation of modern culture.

Soon after situating the need for roots within the need for community, Weil turns to the question of how communities survive and thrive on interaction:

In Weil’s ideal world, exchange—contact with the outside, with difference, with the unfamiliar—does not threaten rootedness. On the contrary, a community that receives no outside influence withers, while one that receives it as “a stimulant intensifying its own particular way of life” flourishes. In other words, Weil asserts that the health of a community depends on some degree of reciprocity with the rest of the world. This claim about community prefaces her theory of mobility for the individual or, more precisely, for manual workers.

Weil’s Theory of Mobility

What distinguishes Weil from many other philosophers who wrote about manual workers in the early twentieth century is that she also chose to become one.10 In 1934–35, she took a year’s leave from her position as a secondary school teacher to work as a factory laborer in Paris, mostly at Renault and Alstom, in order to experience industrial working conditions firsthand. Later, between 1940 and 1942, while living in southern France during the German occupation, she worked as an agricultural laborer. Weil’s lived experiences of manual work informed—and, for many, authorized—her strongest critiques of modern society, her political advocacy for the working class, and her forceful calls to revalue physical labor. In The Need for Roots, she argues that the social revaluation of physical labor requires, among many other things, structured programs to support the spatial and intellectual mobility of members of the working class.

The passage that most directly illuminates Weil’s theory of mobility comes as she analyzes uprootedness in the countryside. When describing the life of a young peasant in rural France, Weil argues counterintuitively that “too great a stability produces in the peasant an uprooting effect.”11 She narrates a young farmer’s first contact with work, then traces its decline:

Stability is a precondition for learning to labor; yet after the work has been learned, it can come to feel like stagnation. The joy of first contact with work fades as the adolescent moves into young adulthood, and there is nothing new to learn. “Some draught ought to be supplied to assuage his thirst for something new,” Weil suggests. “For a young peasant, it can only take one form: travel.”13

In her plan for the regeneration of her native country, Weil proposes the revival in some form of the Tour de France—a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages in which young craftsmen, known as compagnons, would undertake journeys on foot across France, following established itineraries through the principal centers of production, in order to perfect themselves in their trades. This was one of the last vestiges of the guild system gradually killed off by the arrival of the railway.14

Weil argues that all young peasants “should be given the opportunity to travel free of charge in France, or even abroad; not about the cities, but about the countryside.”15 The government should offer cultural and educational opportunities to rural youth, and importantly, these should be opportunities that are relevant to rural livelihoods. Such travels should be, she insists, “purely voluntary. But parents would not have the right to veto them.”16 Forced mobility is one of the harshest forms of uprootedness, but freely chosen mobility, structured and purposive, is a means of formation. It is a process through which a young person encounters enough of the world to make a genuine choice about where and how to live. For the peasant, Weil imagines this choice would often entail a return: “The young man, after knocking about the world for a few years, but without ever ceasing to be a peasant, would return home, his longings appeased, to found a family.”17

Weil includes a parallel discussion about urban workers. In her section on “Uprootedness in the Towns,” she proposes a similar state-sponsored structure of travel for apprenticeships “for the benefit of the young, if necessary on an international scale.”18 Her vision is expansive: up to the age of twenty-two, twenty-five, or thirty—“depending on the individual character”—a young worker “would be regarded as being still in a state of apprenticeship.”19 During this period, the young person would move through varied forms of work and association: “journeys of the Tour de France type, working courses spent, now with artisans working on their own, now in little co-operative workshops, now in assembly shops belonging to different concerns.”20 Weil notes that French trade-unionism, up to the very beginning of the twentieth century, retained something of “the guild spirit”—a spirit in which work was a vocation, not merely a wage, and in which the Tour de France was the institution that gave young workers both mobility and formation.

Weil wants to rebuild this institution, or something like it, because the human need served by movement and exposure to the wider world had not disappeared even as the Tour had fallen out of practice. Weil is particularly vivid in her culminating aspiration for the “young workman”:

Regardless of whether one agrees with this particular vision of happiness, in narrating this structured movement for both the peasant and the craftsman, Weil advances a life course perspective on human development: that there is a need for movement, variety, and encounter that emerges at a particular moment in adolescence or early adulthood that is as real as the need for continuity and belonging. Structured support to enable this movement can ultimately serve the “settling down” into the next stage of adulthood. Weil thus describes a form of spatial mobility that is pursued in the service of eventual rootedness in a particular place and community. Put another way, Weil is suggesting roots should be deliberately planted, not simply inherited.22

The Mobility of the Mind and Spirit

Beyond advocating for structured periods of spatial mobility for manual workers, Weil is equally if not more concerned with what we might call intellectual and spiritual mobility—the capacity of the mind to move freely between practice and reflection, between tradition and novelty, between the particular and the universal, between the everyday and the transcendent. The spatial mobility she proposes is in service to those ends.23 To achieve this, however, requires a fundamental rethinking of the nature of formal education and manual work.

Weil’s critique of modern schooling as both uprooting and intellectually immobilizing is particularly scathing. She describes a culture that has developed “in a very restricted medium, removed from the world, in a stove-pipe atmosphere.”24 Weil uses the image of a stovepipe to describe the dynamics of a modern intellectual culture that is “very strongly directed towards and influenced by technical science, very strongly tinged with pragmatism, extremely broken up by specialization, entirely deprived both of contact with this world and, at the same time, of any window opening on to the world beyond.”25 This intellectual culture is sealed off from lived experience on one side and from spiritual or transcendent reality on the other. It generates its own internal heat (e.g., specialization, technical mastery, professional prestige), but the air inside is stale.

This culture has devastating effects on the young. In one particularly compelling passage, Weil critiques the then-common praise of modern schooling in rural places: “A lot of people think that a little peasant boy of the present day who goes to primary school knows more than Pythagoras did, simply because he can repeat parrot-wise that the earth moves around the sun. In actual fact, he no longer looks at the heavens.”26 In other words, the child who can recite astronomical facts but no longer gazes at the sky has been intellectually immobilized or severed from the kind of knowledge that is rooted in embodied contact with the world.27

For Weil, there is an especially pressing need to rethink education in rural settings because the nature of formal schooling is both irrelevant to and systematically devalues rural livelihoods. “There is something woefully wrong with the health of a social system,” she writes, “when a peasant tills the soil with the feeling that, if he is a peasant, it is because he wasn’t intelligent enough to become a schoolteacher.”28 Too often, formal education reinforces an occupational hierarchy that devalues many forms of physical labor and suggests that if one is to develop and use their mind, they cannot be a manual worker. This value system is imbibed by teachers, who then transmit this value system to their students, both directly and indirectly. Weil insists that “rural teachers should know the peasants and not look down on them.”29 Further, she argues that the nature of education in the countryside should be distinct from education in the cities: “the profession of rural schoolteacher should be something distinct, specific; not merely partially, but totally different from that of a schoolteacher. It is in the highest degree absurd to form in the same mould teachers for Belleville [a working-class quarter of Paris] and for some little village.” And lest she is not clear enough about how she really feels: “It is one of the many absurdities of an age whose salient characteristic is stupidity.”30

A challenge for the young pupil who will go on to become a manual worker is that there is no clear connection between what they learn in school and the manual labor from which they later earn a living. Making clear that this is not a specifically rural condition, Weil turns to the factory workers of the city. She remarks that the urban worker is reduced to feeling they are “an extra cog in a machine, rather less than a thing,” who suffers not only from monotonous labor but from the impossibility of substantive mental engagement.31 The mind has no room to move. Weil insists this is not an inevitable feature of manual work but a contingent product of how work is organized. Work could engage the whole person—body, mind, and spirit. She suggests that the old guild system, whatever its many limitations, did this: it combined craft skill with intellectual formation, and it embedded both in a community of practitioners who shared a tradition. For Weil, “The mind is essentially free and sovereign when it is really and truly exercised.” The factory worker, however, suffers from a “slavery” of the mind: “To be free and sovereign, as a thinking being, for one hour or two, and a slave for the rest of the day, is such an agonizing spiritual quartering that it is almost impossible not to renounce, so as to escape it, the highest forms of thought.”32

Weil’s prescription for “re-establishing the working class by the roots” thus requires rethinking the nature and culture of education while also restructuring and revaluing manual work in modern society.33 While her proposals for how to achieve this are far more sweeping than can be adequately reviewed in this essay, in general they emphasize economic and political decentralization combined with mobility and interaction within the system. Specific suggestions include everything from the state ensuring that everyone can own their own house and “a bit of land” to abolishing large factories in favor of a decentralized system of workshops.34

Echoing her vision of a modern Tour de France applied to an industrial society, Weil imagines structured programs of interaction between these decentralized workshops and a central assembly shop. In her brief description of imagined periodic visits to a central assembly shop, she reveals a relative hierarchy of values in thinking about work, where social and intellectual stimulation are as important as continued technical education:

In visions such as this, Weil imagines what it might look like for the working class to have “work associating him with an enterprise he could love, be proud of, and which was to him as a window opened wide on to the outside world.”36 To achieve such an outcome, she once again sees promise in temporary periods of spatial mobility that could stimulate the continued intellectual growth and feelings of purpose and belonging for those engaged in a manual occupation.

The Need for Mobility Today

Weil’s proposals were written for a France that was never rebuilt according to her plan, and it is easy to dismiss her prescriptions as nice ideas for a society that no longer exists. But if the human needs for roots and mobility are genuine, one wonders: are there modern corollaries to Weil’s structured forms of mobility that serve, rather than sever, rootedness?

The search requires some care, because the most visible contemporary celebrations of youthful travel are not necessarily what Weil had in mind. For example, her specific focus on the mobility of manual laborers is distinct from superficially similar arguments about the value of travel or the “gap year” today. Around the same time that the Tour de France existed for French craftsmen, there was a parallel Grand Tour for European elites. The Grand Tour was an aristocratic institution in which young men were expected to travel the Continent—especially in Italy, though an en route stay in Paris was common—for personal enrichment, classical education, and networking. This was generally limited to men of sufficient means and rank, though later iterations of the circuit tended to include more women. Weil never once mentions the Grand Tour as inspiration in her book, most likely because it was an exclusive rite of passage for the upper classes.

The “gap year” of today is arguably closer to the Grand Tour than the Tour de France. It refers to a growing trend—most common among middle- and upper-class youth—to postpone university education after high school in order to pursue travel and personal growth. The term is now part of the English vernacular and, in some instances, has even become institutionalized as elite universities curate structured programs that encourage deferred enrollment to pursue a period of “self-discovery.”37 Though the gap year is open to people of far more varied backgrounds than the original Grand Tour, it largely remains a luxury available only to young people who have the resources and know-how to pursue it. And in a further important distinction from what Weil had in mind, the gap year’s emphasis is on self-discovery, which in today’s culture most often means charting some new path that departs from the ways of life you inherited.

What about members of the working class? From Weil’s perspective, a young farmer or craftsperson should be able to leave home without ceasing to be what they are, as she put it, and return with the desire to root and participate in a living community. Travel serves a process of reciprocal exchange that, as she describes for communities more generally, acts “as a stimulant intensifying its own particular way of life.”38

Perhaps the closest corollaries to Weil’s proposal may be found among religious or Indigenous communities. Among the Amish, for example, the Rumspringa (running around) is a period of exploration and exposure to the outside world that begins in late adolescence. During this rite of passage, youth deliberately engage with modern society and technology before deciding whether to return and fully commit to the Amish faith and way of life. Ideally, the emphasis here is on exposure to other ways of living in order to facilitate an authentic choice to root within that particular community. Indigenous land-based learning programs like Dechinta (discussed in the “Rethinking Rural Futures” chapter of this volume by Schewel, Rahmanian, and Nourani39) offer other examples. Dechinta provides programs of tertiary education and research grounded in Indigenous knowledge and values. Periods of intensive study (and related travel) allow participants to return home with greater ability and motivation to, as Dechinta’s website puts it, build “Northern Indigenous communities that are radically self-determining, healthy, sustainable, and connected to Indigenous knowledge and practices.”40 Such approaches reflect a fundamental rethinking of higher education as something that might reinforce a community’s distinct way of life rather than erase it.

These examples resonate with Weil’s thesis in part because the communities they serve have a clear identity and shared sense of purpose to which a person can return. How Weil’s vision might be scaled for a nation or a diverse, multicultural society is a much harder question to answer. Yet there are existing structures that gesture in the direction of what such an answer might look like.

The Tour de France itself survives in a small way in France. The Compagnonnage, as it is more commonly known, serves as a traditional mentoring network for young men and women who want to learn a trade while traveling and living in community.41 In Germany, the Wanderjahre (wandering years) is a similar practice dating back to the Middle Ages; after completing an apprenticeship, craftsmen would travel for several years to hone their skills before they could be recognized as a master by their guild. The tradition faded in the 1920s but was revitalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries for crafts and trades like carpentry, roofing, and metalworking. There were over 800 journeymen and journeywomen on the road in 2023.42 There are distinct rites and dress codes as well as a prescribed time frame (at least three years plus one day), and the practice is only permissible for the unmarried, childless, and debt-free.43 While still small-scale, the revitalization of practices such as the Wanderjahre and the Compagnonnage reflects a desire for mobility among those who intend to pursue a manual trade. And destinations now extend far past Germany or France to other European countries and beyond.

Within mainstream higher education, too, there are aspects that resonate with Weil’s vision. For young people today who attend liberal arts schools, going to college is, among other things, a structured period of spatial and intellectual mobility—a sanctioned departure from one’s family of origin, an exposure to different people and ideas, and a moratorium during which the young person is expected to explore before settling into adult life. Although higher education tends to correlate with greater onward mobility, in the United States, where I am writing, most still attend institutions in their home state and settle into adulthood in their home states.44 Further, technical community colleges and extension programs remain oriented toward practical, vocational formation and are often deeply embedded in the regions they serve. These institutions suggest existing infrastructure and patterns of bounded regional mobility upon which something closer to Weil’s vision might be built.

In a more radical direction, there are also glimmerings that the mobility of higher education can serve rootedness in ways its institutions never intended. In an ongoing project with new, first-generation farmers in North Carolina, D. Lee Miller and I are finding that the majority came to agriculture after some awakening during their college years, such as a course on the industrial food system, a semester abroad in a rural setting, or time spent on a campus farm. Most were raised in cities and suburbs and hold university degrees, and their education pointed them toward professional careers other than farming. Yet it was precisely this period of intellectual and spatial mobility that ultimately led them to choose to become farmers and plant roots in a rural place. Motivated by the search for meaningful work, autonomy, ecological connection, and community, their trajectories invert the more familiar pipeline taking people from a rural origin to college and then to an urban, professional career. What their example suggests is the potential for something like a reverse Tour de France: structured opportunities for urban, educated young people to encounter rural livelihoods and ways of life—not as tourists or consumers, but in roles of long enough duration and deep enough engagement that some of them might choose to stay and plant roots.

What Weil Leaves Out

Many things are left out of Weil’s arguments, due primarily to the particular time and milieu in which she was writing as well as the haste with which she finished The Need for Roots. Perhaps most obvious is the absence of a sustained engagement with how to think about working women. When describing the Tour de France system, Weil notes that “something of a similar nature is doubtless necessary for girls too. They certainly need something to take the place of Marie-Claire, and they certainly cannot be left with Marie-Claire.”45 (Marie-Claire was a popular women’s magazine in France, which Weil strongly disliked for its “profound moral and intellectual mediocrity.”46) But she does not say much more than that. This oversight means that Weil offers little for grappling with the ways in which women’s entrance into the workforce has had some of the most far-reaching impacts on the structure and functioning of modern societies. Still, to Weil’s credit, she presents the need for rootedness—and for mobility—as a human need, not a gendered one.

Meanwhile, the “worker” Weil advocated for in her time no longer exists in the same form in today’s advanced capitalist economies. Manufacturing is increasingly automated, and the sharp distinction between manual and intellectual work that structures much of her analysis has blurred as the service sector has ballooned in relative importance. Yet the conditions Weil diagnosed arguably persist in changed form. Today’s gig-economy worker, low-wage service employee, or Amazon warehouse worker typically enters working life with no modern equivalent of the Tour de France—no sanctioned period of formative and free mobility through varied work and community. Their formal education likely bore little relation to the labor from which they now earn a living. And the work itself is often organized in ways that engage neither the mind nor the spirit: it is algorithmically managed, stripped of autonomy, and otherwise fosters the feeling of being an “extra cog in a machine.” The result is an uprootedness that is no less acute despite being dressed in the language of flexibility or entrepreneurship.

A more fundamental challenge to Weil’s theory of mobility, however, is the assumption of return. The mobility she prescribes is circular and formative precisely because it culminates in homecoming. It assumes everyone has a natural community “in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings.”47 While that assumption may hold for many, it will not hold for all. What, then, might her framework offer to those who cannot or choose not to return to their “natural” communities?

The situation of the migrant represents this dilemma most acutely. If “a human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community,” the migrant faces a distinct challenge because their participation in a new place cannot be “natural” if that quality is defined in terms of conditions of birth or early social circumstance.48 It must instead be chosen and built. But chosen participation can still be real and active—and, in time, become natural. And migrants are not the only ones who face this challenge.49 Indeed, the natural community Weil describes presupposes a robust communal world that fewer and fewer people inhabit; where that world has thinned, even those who never leave home may find they must consciously engage in “rooting” through active community building. The migrant is therefore the sharpest instance of what Weil’s theory of mobility already implies: that roots must be deliberately planted, not simply inherited.

Yet roots will only take in the soil of healthy communities capable of nurturing the moral, intellectual, and spiritual life of their members. If those communities have themselves been hollowed out—by the same forces of “money-power,” centralization, and cultural alienation that Weil diagnosed in 1943—then no amount of individual willingness to grow roots or to re-root will suffice. Weil understood this, which is why The Need for Roots is a plan for the regeneration of a country rather than counsel for individuals.

Conclusion

Weil wrote The Need for Roots in a distinct moment of civilizational crisis, yet she believed that the disease of uprootedness was a chronic condition of modernity itself. It has been almost a century since she finished the manuscript, and the forces she diagnosed have only intensified. Today, the nature of work and education is being further transformed by artificial intelligence and robotics, lending her arguments a renewed and perhaps even greater urgency. As machines displace ever more forms of manual and cognitive labor, what constitutes meaningful human work is no longer an abstract question but an urgent one—philosophically and practically—for societies living through this disruption. Weil’s insistence that work must engage the whole person (body, mind, and spirit) and her vision of education as lifelong formation rather than abstract credentialing speak directly to this question. So does her warning that a society whose pursuit of economic transformation requires the systematic devaluation of its most fundamental labor (in agriculture, craft, care, or service) will only deepen uprootedness and the social ills it heralds.

Weil’s book is called The Need for Roots, but it is also, and inseparably, a book about the need for mobility—the kind of purposive, freely chosen movement that makes true rootedness possible. Weil outlines a theory of human development in which the need for mobility and the need for roots are complementary dimensions of a fully human life, each limited without the other. Making both possible for all requires a revaluation of fundamental work, deep educational reform, structured opportunities for spatial mobility, and, perhaps most importantly, rebuilding communities healthy enough to nurture the lives of their members, both old and new. These are the practical requirements of advancing a civilization that has, as Weil saw more clearly than almost anyone, uprooted itself. The question we face today is whether we will continue to produce a global civilization of uprooted people or begin, at last, the patient work of rebuilding communities and nurturing our roots.