ABSTRACT
Simone Weil’s thinking on liberty underwent a profound development over the course of her
life, yet throughout this development she was fundamentally concerned to identify the
weaknesses of our inherited traditions to generate an adequate grasp or a meaningful
conception of liberty. For Weil this task was crucial because if we have an unreal sense
of liberty, our efforts to attain it will be misdirected or, worse, will themselves undermine
our aspirations to freedom by generating different and deeper structures of subordination.
