Simone Weil: Intellectual Mischief-Maker

Venice Saved | Simone Weil | Bloomsbury Academic

By Tim McIntosh

In 1933 Simone Weil arranged for Leon Trotsky, the Soviet revolutionary, to visit her parents’ apartment in Paris so she could debate him on the merits of the Communist revolution. Trotsky was a fiery debater—most college professors would have been reluctant to oppose him. But not the twenty-three-year-old Weil. She was precocious, fearle…