Ideas Have Consequences by {author}: summary and why it matters

What it argues

Weaver, a Southern scholar of rhetoric, traced the modern malaise to a decision made in the fourteenth century, when William of Occam and the nominalists denied that universal truths have real existence. Once that was accepted, he argued, objective standards of good, beauty and justice lost their anchor, and man became the measure of all things.

From that single choice he drew a long train of effects: the cult of the individual's feelings, the reduction of property to something merely to be consumed, the erosion of the family and community, the debasement of language and art, and a mass society that values efficiency and novelty above wisdom. He defended private property as the last metaphysical right, a stake that gives a person standing against the state.

The book is short, polemical, and written in a high style. Weaver does not offer a program; he calls for a recovery of reverence, piety toward the past and a respect for form.

Why it matters

Along with Kirk's work, it helped launch the postwar conservative revival. Its basic claim, that cultural and moral questions come before politics, still shapes how many conservatives talk about education, art and family.

Critics find the sweeping history tendentious, and readers should treat the Occam thesis as an argument rather than established fact. Its force is in the question it asks about what a society believes about truth.

About the author

Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963) was a professor of English at the University of Chicago who came from a Southern family and studied at Vanderbilt and Louisiana State University. Ideas Have Consequences was his first book and grew out of his doctoral work. He later wrote The Ethics of Rhetoric and Visions of Order, and his work influenced young conservatives of the 1950s.

Who should read it

Readers interested in the cultural side of the movement, and anyone curious how one short book could shape a generation. It rewards slow reading.