ABSTRACT
Simone Weil was only 34 years of age when she died in the UK during World War II. During those 34 years she lived a life of undeniable intensity. Born in France and trained there as a philosopher, she had a life-long interest in the conditions of un- and semi-skilled laborers. This interest motivated stints of very hard factory and other work, for which he was physically unsuited.
For Weil, concentrated thinking was the foremost necessity for any real life. For this reason, she wanted to reform work so that thought was possible to a degree impossible within most laborer jobs of the time. One of the primary dangers in such jobs, Weil believed, was the ever-increasing drive toward specialization. As a consequence, she envisioned more general work (including machines that were more generalized) with greater room for worker autonomy. She was not unrealistically optimist about the prospects for this; still, she felt that introducing even small spaces for real thought within the working world is worthwhile.
