Simone Weil’s “The Power of Words” and a Call to Redefine “Democracy”

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Simone Weil’s essay “The Power of Words”[1] is about our tendency throughout history to use hazy words and phrases to express ideas that “call forth the spirit of self-sacrifice and cruelty.” If scrutinized, these terms turn out to be “empty” of “content and meaning.”

Writing just after Hitler’s rise to power, the ones she has in mind are dictatorship, fascism, communism, democracy, nation, and national security.

Then as now, these words were used as weapons by those in power to maintain and expand it. They are deployed because they make us want to vote and die and kill for what we think they mean.

Their force lies in their spongelike ability to absorb competing meanings, “myths and monsters.” Flawed and lazy thinking about them leads to problems that aren’t just semantic. Weil wanted to combat this through the process of redefinition:

To clarify thought, to discredit the intrinsically meaningless words, and to define the use of others by precise analysis — to do this, strange though it may sound, might be a way of saving human lives.