Dana Mills, lecturer in political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, discusses Simone Weil and activism.

About Dana Mills
"I'm the Director of International Relations at Gisha and I have taught political theory at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam.

I’ve written books on dance and politics, and especially revolutionary women. Most recently, I wrote a biography of Rosa Luxemburg."

Key Points

• Simone Weil reflected on the relationship between our own actions and the solidarity we might offer others.
• In her views on social justice, she shifted the focus from rights to duties: what we owe each other, not what we are owed.
• Her concept of attention was a way to move away from the ego and accept that we are only part of something larger than us.

Simone Weil was a Jewish French thinker, theologian, philosopher, activist and organiser who was born in 1909 to a middle-class French family, which gave her a very well-rounded education. Her brother was the mathematician André Weil, who was incredibly famous in his own right.

Simone was an incredibly precocious child. She was very well-read; she read Plato and Pascal as a young girl and fell in love with philosophy, but she was also concerned with the state of the world. From a very young age, she showed a tendency that would last her entire life, which was her ability to identify with people who were suffering. When she was six, she heard that people were starving in France and did not have access to food, so she refused to have sugar in her tea as an act of solidarity.