Simone Weil wrestled with the problem of authority throughout her career, not only in connection with her political philosophy but also in her writings on religion, science, education, and related subjects. After 1937 the theme of authority acquires a more distinctive profile, as Weil's thought becomes increasingly focused on religion, specifically the necessity of absolute obedience to God. A book-length treatment of Weil's reflections on authority is, therefore, certainly warranted by the prominence of the theme in her work.

Desmond Avery's book starts with three introductory chapters (part 1) on the general concept of authority and its relation to Weil's biography and to her later theological reflections. Its remaining six chapters guide us through the principal areas of Weil's thought (religion, politics, science, work, justice, and education), with the aim of showing how Weil's attempt to come to terms with the concept of authority animates her reflections in these areas. Each chapter is correlated to one of the petitions of the Lord's Prayer (following Weil's meditation, “Concerning the Our Father”). In part 1, Avery demonstrates how the tension between the human need for autonomy, especially autonomy of thought, on the one hand, and the need for something to which one can give oneself unconditionally on the other, determines the problem of authority for Weil. He identifies three forms of authority (political, spiritual, and practical) in chapter one, and highlights not only the ways in which they come into inevitable conflict with one another, but also the tension between autonomy and obedience that arises within each form. The chapter on religion contains an interesting discussion of the way in which Weil's sense of personal susceptibility to collective feelings (the “herd instinct,” as she called it, or Plato's “great beast”) colored her thought on authority and led her to be perhaps unduly suspicious of any form of authority grounded in large-scale social organization. Avery cites Weil's well-known admission to Father Perrin that were she to encounter a group of young people singing Nazi songs in chorus, a part of her soul would immediately become Nazi (62). Yet at the same time, Avery notes, Weil clearly saw, most notably in her political treatise The Need for Roots, the necessity for human beings to be grounded in genuine communities, with the concomitant requirement for some form of communal authority. Avery suggests that “a reading of St. Augustine's City of God might have helped her resolve these difficulties,” but he unfortunately drops the prescription immediately without any discussion of what such an Augustinian resolution might be.

Avery's chapter on politics begins with a brief discussion of Weil's essay “Crisis of Authority?” (1937) and proceeds promisingly to a comparison of Weil's thoughts on the subject to those of Hannah Arendt in the latter's “What Is Authority?” (1958). A fruitful juxtaposition of Weil and Arendt, however, would have to address (rather than merely mention) the difference that Arendt's analysis, being expressly historical in character, contains no attempt per se to identify the legitimate source of human authority. Avery's observation that for both Weil and Arendt the source of human authority must lie beyond those who wield power (thus the title of the book presently under review) is not especially helpful in this connection, since in Arendt's essay this “beyond” is tradition as it functioned in ancient Rome, while for Weil God is the ultimate source of all legitimate authority. The comparison, of course, raises the question of the authority of a religious tradition, something about which Weil seems to have harbored an inveterate suspicion and about which one wishes Avery would have said more.

The subject of Weil and religion raises one of the weaknesses of the book, namely, Avery's propensity to treat Weil's embrace of Christianity after 1937 as more an adoption of a new “language” with which to express transcendent or metaphysical insights than as the religious conversion it actually was. Weil in the final period of her life was a Christian believer. She declined baptism not principally for reasons of doctrine, but rather due to her rejection, at least as far as she herself was concerned, of the spiritual authority of the Roman Church. The fact that she did not believe that religious language is to be taken literally does not distinguish her from, for example, Thomas Aquinas. It is therefore a serious distortion for Avery to assert, as he does on page 39, for instance, that when Weil speaks of Christ taking “possession” of her, “she is not stating a factual belief that could be considered either true or false.” To be sure this is no “factual belief” on Weil's part, but for her it was most certainly a true one, indeed, the greatest truth of her life. While Weil does often use the term Christ to mean any incarnation of the Son (or second person of the Trinity), and did not believe that Jesus was the only possible incarnation of Christ, there is really no doubt that the meaning of Christ for her was determined by the person of Jesus and that she believed that Jesus was Christ.

It is difficult for this reviewer to recommend the book as a comprehensive treatment of the concept of authority in Weil, as the connections with authority in the chapters dealing with specific topics such as science, work, and education are rather too perfunctory. The chapter on education, for instance, while providing a fair account of Weil's reflections on the matter, relates them to the concept of authority only by saying that authority in the classroom means “involving the whole class, including oneself, in the adventure of discovery” (171), and that education is authoritative “to the extent that it reveals the truth to the student” (177). What one would have wanted is a more detailed analysis of how the tension between the different kinds of authority (political, practical, spiritual) comes into play in education, and how the conflict between individual autonomy and authority expresses itself, for example, in the relationship between teacher and student.

The book should be helpful, nevertheless, as a general introduction to Weil's thought. Avery provides useful summaries of the principal areas of interest in Weil's writings and, notwithstanding the caveat mentioned above regarding Weil and Christianity, gives clear explanations of her basic approach in each area. After reading the book one would have a good idea of how to proceed with one's own study of Simone Weil.

A final note regarding the book's frequent lapses of factual accuracy and writing style, which should have been noted and corrected in the editing process. On page 85, for instance, we find the following sentence: “In 1942, the situation in Europe was bad, most particularly for the group to which Simone Weil now belonged—Jewish refugees in France.” “Most particularly”? That would have come as a surprise to inhabitants of Auschwitz in 1942. On page 89 we are told that Arendt was more able than Weil to “dwell with equanimity on what was admirable and deplorable about the Romans.” Presumably “even-handedness” (perhaps “equity”) is intended here rather than “equanimity,” since the latter means calmness, not fairness. On page 113 we read that Weil treated the concept of entropy in light of the “principle of inertia, described by Galileo as the transformation of energy like a rubber ball bouncing with diminishing force and coming to rest.” However, the concept of energy did not yet exist in Galileo's time, and his understanding of inertia was unrelated to “diminishing force” in any case. Moreover, Weil's discussion of Galileo and inertia in Sur la science makes no such connection. Were these merely isolated lapses, one would prescind from commenting, but they sadly recur throughout the book. That they have found their way into the final text reflects badly on the editing process at Lexington Books.