Richard Weaver: life, ideas and books

Life

Richard M. Weaver was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1910. He took his A.B. at the University of Kentucky in 1932, a master's degree at Vanderbilt in 1934 and a doctorate in English at Louisiana State University in 1943. From 1944 he taught English at the University of Chicago and remained there for the rest of his career.

He won the university's Quantrell teaching award in 1949 and the Young Americans for Freedom award in 1962. He had accepted an appointment at Vanderbilt when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Chicago in 1963. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute named a graduate fellowship for him in 1964.

Ideas

Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948) argued that the modern West had suffered a decline whose root was the abandonment of belief in transcendent truth, traced to the late medieval nominalism that denied real universals. Materialism, relativism and the cult of efficiency followed from this move, and the results were visible in culture, education and morals. He called private property the last metaphysical right, a defence of individual dignity against concentrated power.

His scholarship in rhetoric was important in its own right. In The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) he argued that the way people use language shapes their moral character and that careless or manipulative speech corrupts social life. His sympathies were with the Southern agrarian tradition, which he defended in his dissertation, published after his death as The Southern Tradition at Bay (1968). He favoured an order based on hierarchy, chivalry and a shared moral inheritance, and he opposed what he saw as the dominance of industrial capitalism and mass culture.

Major works

• Ideas Have Consequences (1948).
• The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953).
• Visions of Order (1964).
• The Southern Tradition at Bay (1968, published after his death).

Why conservatives read him

Ideas Have Consequences is routinely listed among the books that started the postwar conservative revival, alongside Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. The title has become a conservative proverb, shorthand for the claim that culture, not just politics, determines the fate of a society. Weaver also contributed to the first issue of Kirk's journal Modern Age in 1957.

His emphasis on the Southern tradition is controversial, and readers who admire his thought on language and culture should also face the questions the society he defended raises. Within the movement, Harry Jaffa attacked the traditionalists' reading of American history, and Weaver's reading of the Declaration was among the targets. Admirers of G. K. Chesterton and of the Christian humanist tradition find in Weaver an American counterpart.