In this moving account of Simone Weil’s political thought, Benjamin Davis merges world history and personal testimony, theory and living, brain and heart. He shows that one’s scholarship and one’s life cannot be separated easily.

Christy Wampole, Princeton University

This book made me understand Simone Weil in a thrilling new way. With clear exposition and forceful argumentation, engaging with Weil texts that are familiar and those that are often overlooked, Benjamin Davis succeeds in inserting Weil into the canon of outstanding twentieth-century political philosophers.

Vincent Lloyd, Villanova University

In his beautifully written and assiduously detailed book, Davis considers Simone Weil's politics of community, of self, and of thought. Approaching Weil as a sophisticated political philosopher, Davis illuminates an entirely new dimension of Simone Weil's engagement with the turbulence of her time. He does so with all the grace and attention one could desire, and provides an irrefutable argument as to why we should all be reading Simone Weil with Davis as our guide.

Helen M. Kinsella, University of Minnesota

Too many of Simone Weil’s readers have accepted some version of Charles de Gaulle’s condescending verdict: ‘she’s crazy’. In this powerful and thoughtful study, Benjamin Davis treats Weil as a philosopher who tested her ideas in the factories, high schools, and battlefields of world capitalism and the French Empire. In doing so, he offers a strikingly original portrait of a thinker whose commitment to unifying thought and action offers much to anyone who hopes to understand capitalism and empire today.

Jessica Whyte, University of New South Wales

Simone Weil has captured the attention of readers inside and outside the academy, from Iris Murdoch to Susan Sontag. Yet she remains relatively marginal in theoretical discourses. Her life was short, her writing both vivid and perplexing. In his ambitious monograph, Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy, Benjamin P. Davis sets out to reclaim Weil both for political and critical theory and for contemporary reflection on life amidst capitalism and empire... The sheer breadth of texts brought together surely offer something to both aims. I imagine that this monograph also serves a third audience: political and critical theorists interested in but unfamiliar with Weil. Weil offers an example of the scholar-activist or philosopher-activist whom so many academics in theoretical fields have come to study, admire, and sometimes idealize. Such scholars will learn from Davis’s approach—particularly his attentive framing of why it is crucial to avoid both myth and pathology.

Theory and Event