Richard Weaver Said Ideas Have Consequences and Traced Them Back Centuries

Three words made one of the most useful slogans of the American right, and the man who wrote the book did not choose them. That is the first irony. The second is that the slogan is so familiar, so easy to say, that people forget what it was meant to prove. It was meant to be a scandal. In 1948 most educated Americans believed that ideas were the froth on the real business of history: economics, geography, technology, power. Richard Weaver said the froth was the current.

Ideas Have Consequences is a short, severe, beautifully written book, and I want to do two things with it. First, tell you plainly what it argues, because the argument is better than its reputation. Second, subject it to the fair criticism it has earned. A conservative should be able to admire a book and still check its history.

The professor from the South

Richard Malcolm Weaver was born in 1910 in Asheville, North Carolina, and grew up in the South, partly in Kentucky. He studied at the University of Kentucky and at Vanderbilt University, where he came under the influence of the poets and critics associated with the Southern Agrarians, and he earned his doctorate at Louisiana State University in 1943. He taught at Texas A&M and then, from 1944, at the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career teaching English composition and rhetoric to undergraduates in the College.

It is worth pausing on that. The author of one of the most famous conservative books of the century made his living teaching freshmen how to write a sentence. He believed, with a fervour that is itself part of the story, that language is where a civilisation keeps its convictions. His later book, The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953), argued that the way a person argues reveals what he believes about truth. He died in 1963, and a volume of essays, Visions of Order, appeared the following year.

The argument in one paragraph, and then in steps

Weaver's claim is that the modern world is in a crisis not of economics or politics but of belief, and that the crisis has a date and a cause. Somewhere in the fourteenth century, he said, Western thinkers made a wrong turn, and every generation since has walked further down it.

Terms first.

• Universals: the idea that there are real, objective truths and kinds that exist independently of our naming them: that justice, goodness and human nature are real things, which our words describe rather than invent.
• Realism, in the medieval philosophical sense: the belief that universals exist. Plato and Aquinas, each in his way, were realists.
• Nominalism: the belief that universals are only names, that only individual things exist and that general terms are labels we attach for convenience.
• Transcendent: reaching beyond the material world; standing above and judging human arrangements rather than being made by them.

Here is the chain of reasoning.

1. For most of the Middle Ages, thinkers believed that reality had a structure we discover. There was a moral order in the world, and human law answered to it.
2. In the fourteenth century, William of Ockham and others argued the nominalist case. If only individuals exist and general terms are only names, then there is no objective moral order to discover. Weaver treated the victory of that doctrine over medieval realism as a decisive turning point in Western history.
3. Once the objective order is doubted, authority must come from somewhere else. It comes from individual will, from power, from the market, from the majority, from the state.
4. Over several centuries the effects spread. From philosophy the doctrine passed to theology, to science, to politics, to education and to the ordinary habits of mind. People came to treat values as preferences, and then as noises.
5. The twentieth century is the result. A society that cannot say what is true or good has no argument against whoever is strongest, and it is left with appetite, fashion and force. Weaver wrote in the shadow of the Second World War and the atomic bomb, and he read those as symptoms.

The first sentence of that chain is a claim about the past, and we will come back to whether it is right. The last is a claim about the present, and it is hard to dismiss: a society that can no longer say why anything is wrong will have trouble holding anyone to account.

How the title came about

The slogan itself has a modest history. Weaver's book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948. According to the accounts of the book's history, Weaver had a different title in mind, a grim one, The Fearful Descent, and it was the publisher's side that suggested the title the book now carries. I report it as the usual story and would invite you to check it in a biography or a preface to a later edition.

Whatever the exact history, the publisher's instinct was right. Ideas Have Consequences is a motto, a thing you can say in four seconds and spend a career defending. It is the title that made the book travel, and it gave conservatives a sentence to answer the cheerful materialism of the day. See C. S. Lewis Warned About Men Without Chests in a Book About Schoolbooks for a kindred argument, from the same decade and a different country, about what happens when a culture teaches its young that values are mere feelings.

Private property, the last metaphysical right

The part of the book that surprises readers who know only its reputation is the chapter on property. Weaver called the right of private property "the last metaphysical right" left to us, and it is worth following his thought.

Here is how it goes. In an age that has lost its sense of an objective order, most of the traditional rights have lost their foundation. A right is a claim that stands above the wishes of the majority, and if there is nothing above the majority's wishes, rights are only privileges the majority happens to allow. But property is different. A man's ownership of his house or his farm is a concrete, visible thing; he can see it, hold it and defend it. It gives him a place to stand which is independent of the state, and from that place he can say no. So long as many people own property, a refuge remains from the demands of the collective, and so Weaver defended it as the one right that still has, in a materialist age, a footing in the real world.

Notice that this is not the usual economic defence of property as the engine of growth. It is a defence in terms of dignity and independence. The reasoning resembles John Locke's account of how labour joins a person to the things of the earth, and the argument of Locke Said Property Begins the Moment Your Labor Mixes With the Earth, though Weaver stands in a more traditional frame than Locke. It also reaches the same conclusion as Property Rights Are Human Rights Because People Hold Property, Not Things: that a person with something of his own is harder to push around. And it resonates with the economist Wilhelm Röpke's concern for widely held property, treated in Wilhelm Röpke Defended Markets and Warned They Need Something Beyond Them.

The case for the book

Let me state the favourable reading in a paragraph before I turn to the problems.

The book sees something real. Modern societies have, in the main, lost the confidence to speak of an objective moral order. It is common to hear that "your truth" is different from "my truth," and that value judgments are only preferences. A conservative who holds that justice is real, and that human nature is something fixed we can know, has a quarrel with that view, and Weaver provides one of its sharpest statements. The Declaration of Independence rests on "self-evident" truths and on "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God." That is language of the realist and not the nominalist. If there is no such order, the Declaration is a piece of rhetoric. Weaver is a helpful guide to why it matters.

The criticism, stated fairly

The book has been criticised, and some of the criticism is right.

The history is too sweeping. Weaver traces a straight line from a fourteenth-century debate among philosophers to the cultural condition of the twentieth century. Historians of ideas are wary of such lines. Many things happened between Ockham and 1948: the Reformation, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and two world wars. To make one philosophical doctrine the master cause is to simplify. It is also disputed whether Ockham's view was as radical, or as influential on later thinkers, as Weaver claimed. And it is possible to hold that the medieval world was not as unified as the story requires. A reader should treat the thesis as an arresting hypothesis, not a settled finding.

The nostalgia is selective. Weaver admired the pre-modern order of the Middle Ages and the old South, and some readers find in him a romantic view of hierarchy. Critics ask what that admiration leaves out, and in particular what it makes of slavery and its aftermath in the American South. A fair reader cannot ignore the question. The right answer, in my view, is that the truth Weaver defended, an objective moral order, is the very thing that condemns slavery. It was the realist case, from the Declaration to Lincoln, that undermined it. The man's attachments need to be weighed against the principle.

The diagnosis may outrun the cure. Weaver was better at describing the sickness than at saying what a healthy society would do tomorrow morning. His remedies, a recovery of reverence, of piety toward the past and of a sense of limits, are more a call to a change of mind than a political programme. That is a limit, and it also recalls Oakeshott's point that conservatism is a disposition and not a plan; see Oakeshott Said Being Conservative Is a Temperament Before It Is a Program.

A defender of ideas should welcome the argument. The right response to these objections is the one the book itself invites: argue about ideas, with evidence. A writer who says ideas have consequences cannot complain when his own are examined.

A test you can run at home

Weaver's thesis predicts something you can check in an afternoon. Listen to how public arguments are conducted. When a person says that a policy is wrong, does he say it is unjust, or only that he dislikes it? When a school says it teaches values, does it say which are true or only which are "ours"? A realist treats a moral claim as something that can be right or wrong, and so something worth arguing about with evidence. A nominalist treats it as an expression of a group, to be tolerated or defeated. The first kind of argument can end in persuasion. The second can end only in a contest of numbers or force. Wherever you find the second kind spreading, Weaver would say you are watching the consequences of an idea arrive.

That is not a proof of his history. It is a reason to take the question seriously, and it is a good habit for a citizen: ask of any claim whether it is the sort of thing that could be true.

What it means for us

Take the book's central point without taking all of its history. Three lessons hold up.

1. Ideas shape institutions before institutions shape ideas. The laws we pass and the schools we run follow from what we believe about people and truth. A movement that ignores education and the culture and concentrates only on elections is working downstream.
2. A free society needs a shared understanding of something above itself. The Founders thought rights came from the Creator. Whether or not one holds that, a rights-based order needs a basis that cannot be repealed by a majority. See Unalienable Means You Cannot Even Give Your Rights Away, and Here Is Why and Rights Are Not Social Constructs, and Here Is the Answer to That Claim.
3. Tradition is the storehouse of what earlier people learned. A conservative defends it not from sentiment but from respect for accumulated experience; see Tradition Is Not Nostalgia, and Five Other Myths About Conservatives.

The case in brief

1. Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948) argued that modern decline begins with the abandonment of belief in universal, objective truth.
2. He traced the break to fourteenth-century nominalism and followed its effects through theology, politics and culture to the crisis of his own century.
3. He defended private property as the last metaphysical right, the one concrete refuge from the claims of the collective in an age that had lost its belief in an objective order.
4. His history is too sweeping, and his nostalgia must be weighed against the moral order he defended, which is itself the ground for condemning slavery.
5. The enduring lesson is that ideas come first: a free society must teach and defend the truths on which its institutions rest.

What you can do: read the Declaration of Independence aloud with your family this month, stop at "self-evident," and ask what that word assumes about truth.