Notes for the release in Russian of Simone Weil’s article “Personality and the Sacred”
Anyone who opens Simone Weil's Notebooks in the mid-1930s will be faced with, to say the least, an ambivalent attitude towards the idea of law. On the one hand, it acts as a condition of freedom and a sign of development: “laws are the only source of freedom. Therefore, at the level of primitive religions, everything that is a rule constitutes great progress” (Notebooks, Volume 1, p. 66). Or: “the difference between slave and citizen... is the interval between caprice and rule” (pp. 82-83).