 In early August 1932, Weil travelled to Germany in order to understand better the conditions fostering Nazism. German trade unions, she wrote to friends upon her return to France, were the single force in Germany able to generate a revolution, but they were fully reformist. Long periods of unemployment left many Germans without energy or esteem. At best, she observed frankly, they could serve as a kind of dead weight in a revolution. More specifically, by early 1933 she criticized the tendency of social organizations to engender bureaucracy, which elevated management and collective thinking over and against the individual worker. Against this tendency, she advocated for workers’ understanding the physical labor they performed within the context of the whole organizational apparatus. In “Reflections Concerning the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression” (1934), Weil presented both a summation of her early thought and a prefiguring of central elements in her thematic trajectory. The essay employs a Marxian method of analysis that pays attention to the oppressed, critiques her own position as an intellectual, privileges manual labor, and demands precise and unorthodox individual thinking that unites theory and practice against collective clichés, propaganda, obfuscation, and hyper-specialization. These ideas would provide a theoretical framework for her idiosyncratic practice of philosophy. Near the end of her life she wrote in a notebook: “Philosophy (including problems of cognition, etc.) is exclusively an affair of action and practice” (FLN 362).