Richard Weaver

The Importance of Cultural Freedom

Culture by its very nature tends to be centripetal, or to aspire toward some unity in its representational modes. The reason for this is that every culture polarizes around some animating idea, figment, or value, toward which everything that it produces bears some discoverable relation...

The Attack on Memory

History is the “remembered past,” remembered according to values and virtues that are the inheritance of a particular people. The story as told gives meaning to the “facts,” and the story must be told to be remembered... “Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent,...

Up, Maybe, From Liberalism

What has alarmed me most as I moved away from liberalism—or as it moved away from me—was how quick my liberal friends were to renounce and reject our delicate social fabric as oppressive, as exclusionary, or as just plain worthless. Churches? Schools? Communities? Not just anachronisms, according...

The Lasting South? A Reconsideration

Ambiguities and contradictions aside, the Southern conservative tradition, by a heroic act of mind, may yet be summoned against the distortions of modernity, and, in particular, against the alluring gnostic supposition, now so prevalent, that men can alter the nature of existence and transmute the substance of...

Life Without Prejudice

Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principle. For prejudices are often built-in principles. They are the extract which the mind has made of experience... Prejudice becomes a flail to beat enemies—traditional distinctions, essential to a workable...

Studies in Words

Since the present meaning of a word is often vaguely swayed by past meanings which have dropped into the subconscious, a knowledge of particular semantic histories can increase our facility and sometimes save us from an inadvertent error... Studies in Words by C.S. Lewis...

The Closing of the Western Mind

Allan Bloom’s diagnosis in The Closing of the American Mind can explain far more about the sorry state of American higher education and the Western condition than popular stories that blame the Enlightenment, or democracy, or medieval nominalism. And it is therefore a valuable starting point...

Beauty Will Save the World

If art cannot save our souls, it can do much to redeem the time, to give us a true image of ourselves, both in the horror and the boredom to which we can descend, and in the glory which we may, in rare moments, be privileged to...

The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver: Beginnings & Completions

Richard Weaver claimed his homeland was the "last nonmaterialistic civilization in the western world." Modernity to him meant at bottom institutionalizing most of the Seven Deadly Sins... Though his worth and stature were early established among them,...

Up From Liberalism

Liberalism is the refuge favored by intellectual cowardice, because the essence of the liberal's position is that he has no position... There is a saying by William Butler Yeats that a man begins to understand the world by studying...

The Cultivation of Complexity: Reading Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry’s poetry sings with the love of a man for his home, enticing the reader to embrace his vision of local agrarian economy as sufficient for the good life... “From knowledge of the forest comes/at...

Humanism in an Age of Science

The ideal of the human under the aegis of something higher provides the strongest counter-pressure against the fragmentation and barbarization of our world... Editorial Note: The essay has been edited from an untitled, undated transcript of a lecture which Richard Weaver delivered to a meeting of the Newman...

A Responsible Rhetoric

Responsible rhetoric is a rhetoric responsible primarily to the truth. It measures the degree of validity in a statement, and it is aware of the sources of controlling that it employs... Editorial Note: The text of "A Responsible Rhetoric" is taken from a transcription of a tape recording...

What Can the Southern Tradition Teach Us?

Looking at the whole of the South’s promise and achieve­ment, I would be unwilling to say that it offers a foundation, or, because of some accidents of history, even an example. The most that it offers is a challenge...