John Dunn

First posted on Monday, 28 October 2013 at 17:23

T.S. Eliot wrote the preface to the English edition of The Need for Roots; and it is not hard to see why he was an admirer of Weil’s work. He had written previously of a return to Christianity as the basis of the social organism. A society founded on the Christian ethos would ‘compel changes in our organisation of industry and commerce and financial credit’ and it would facilitate rather than as at present impede, a life of devotion for those capable of it.1

The alternative to the dissolutive impact of liberalism was the basic social unit that Eliot identified in England as the parish, a ‘unitary community’ of a ‘religious-social’ character, which has been undermined by industrialism and urbanisation. The parish was:

a small and mostly self-contained group attached to the soil and having its interests centred in a particular place, with a kind of unity which may be designed, but which also has to grow through generations. It is the idea, or ideal, of a community small enough to consist of a nexus of direct personal relationships, in which all iniquities and turpitudes will take the simple and easily appreciable form of wrong relations between one persona and another. 2