Reflections on the causes of freedom and social oppression

We need to imagine a form of material life in which only efforts directed exclusively by clear thinking would come into play, which would imply that each worker himself would have to control [...], not only the adaptation of his efforts to the work to be produced, but also their coordination with the efforts of all the other members of the community. Simone Weil

In 1934, at a time when an economic crisis was shaking the world and part of Europe was falling into dictatorship, Simone Weil, who was only twenty-five, set about writing her Réflexions sur les causes de la liberté et de l'oppression sociale (Reflections on the Causes of Freedom and Social Oppression), which she called her "grand oeuvre". The philosophical question she poses is: under what conditions can work be a free act? Such a question assumes that the transition from oppression to freedom does not lead to a world without work, but rather consists, for the spirit, in actively renewing the pact that unites it with the universe, for in work the spirit is brought into contact with the reality of the world, so that it is not reduced to a series of actions performed under duress; on the contrary, it is "the human act par excellence", through which the union of necessity and freedom is realized. Work, as a human value, is perhaps, says Weil, "the only spiritual conquest made by human thought since the Greek miracle".