 The ontology behind Weil’s notion of free labor draws on the Kantian emphasis on the individual as an end—especially, for Weil, in her or his capacity for thinking (with Plato, for whom knowing and doing are united). In addition, the teleology of labor in Weil’s philosophy corresponds with the thought of Hegel and Marx, and is in opposition to Locke: in the individual’s mixing with the material world, her interest lies in how this promotes liberty, rather than property. The uprooting Weil experienced in factory work introduced a shift in her conception of freedom: as she began to see the human condition as not just one of inexorable struggle, but of slavery, her notion of freedom shifted from a negative freedom from constraints to a positive freedom to obey. She referred to the latter, a particular kind of relational freedom, as “consent”. She concluded her “inventory of modern civilization” (OL 116) with a call to introduce play into the bureaucratic machine and a call to think as individuals, denying the “social idol” by “refusing to subordinate one’s own destiny to the course of history” and by taking up “critical analysis” (OL 117). In sum, by 1934 Weil pictured an ideal society, which she conceptualized as a regulative impossibility in which manual labor, understood and performed by thinking individuals, was a “pivot” toward liberty.