Richard Weaver Archives ~ Page 2 of 3 ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Humanism in an Age of Science

By Richard Weaver|2020-01-14T11:43:02-06:00July 12th, 2017|Categories: Christian Humanism, Culture, Featured, Richard Weaver, Science, The Imaginative Conservative|

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 Club at the University of Chicago shortly [...]

A Responsible Rhetoric

By Richard Weaver|2019-04-28T22:57:33-05:00June 19th, 2017|Categories: Language, Rhetoric, Richard Weaver, The Imaginative Conservative|

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 of a speech Richard M. Weaver delivered [...]

What Can the Southern Tradition Teach Us?

By Richard Weaver|2017-04-25T21:56:15-05:00April 25th, 2017|Categories: History, Richard Weaver, South, Southern Agrarians, Tradition|

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… History is a liberal art and one profits by studying the whole of it, including the [...]

How Firm a Foundation? The Prospects for American Conservatism

By George Nash|2017-05-17T21:15:59-05:00March 17th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, George Nash, Richard Weaver|Tags: 1IR|

What do conservatives want? Limited government, they answer; free enterprise; strict construction of the Constitution; fiscal responsibility; traditional values and respect for the sanctity of human life. No doubt, but I wonder: how much are these traditional catchphrases and abstractions persuading people anymore? How much are they inspiring the rising generation?… (essay by George Nash) [...]

The Conservative Illusion

By Richard Weaver|2017-02-25T11:44:44-06:00February 10th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Richard Weaver, The Imaginative Conservative|

No informed person will deny that conservatism has been having a rough time for several decades. But to pass from the presence of conflict to a conclusion that control and discipline and order have no place in the world is to reverse the process by which political judgments should be arrived at… The Conservative Illusion, [...]

The Tragic Education

By Richard Weaver|2019-06-06T12:30:57-05:00June 22nd, 2016|Categories: Education, Quotation, Richard Weaver, Tragedy|

Perhaps there is nothing in the world as truly educative as tragedy. When you have known it, you’ve known the worst, and probably also you have had a glimpse of the mystery of things. And if this is so, we may infer that there is nothing which educates or matures a man or a people [...]

The Conservatism of Willmoore Kendall

By John P. East|2022-03-07T15:48:54-06:00June 20th, 2016|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Federalist Papers, Richard Weaver, Willmoore Kendall|

(This essay is the fourth in a four-part series; the first may be found here, the second here, and the third here.) It is clear that Publius’s deliberative process, with its emphasis upon accommodation, harmony, and consensus, is antithetical to the conflict-oriented majoritarianism of the egalitarians. As a corollary proposition, it is essential to note that [...]

Richard Weaver’s Conservatism of Affirmation & Hope

By John P. East|2022-02-23T11:04:16-06:00May 19th, 2016|Categories: Conservatism, Featured, Plato, Relativism, Richard Weaver, South, Western Civilization|

III Richard Weaver reasoned it was the emergence of nominalism, the departure from Platonism and Christianity, which produced the intellectual heresies leading to the trauma and anguish of the modern era. “It was,” he elaborated, “William of Occam who propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence,” and as [...]

Richard Weaver: The Conservatism of Piety

By John P. East|2022-08-09T17:15:09-05:00May 12th, 2016|Categories: Conservatism, Faith, Featured, Plato, Richard Weaver, St. Augustine, Western Tradition|

Confronted with choices between evil and good, man frequently chooses evil with its accompanying anguish. Would not wisdom and prudence dictate that man ought to be modest, restrained, and humble—in a word, pious? Born in Weaverville, North Carolina in 1910, Richard Malcolm Weaver was raised in Lexington, Kentucky. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Weaver graduated [...]

Education and the Individual

By Richard Weaver|2020-10-26T11:40:17-05:00April 17th, 2016|Categories: Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Richard Weaver, Timeless Essays|

Education for individualism is education for goodness. The unfreeman cannot be good because virtue is a state of character concerned with choice. The moment we judge the smallest action in terms of right and wrong, we are stepping up to a plane where the good is felt as an imperative. The greatest school that ever [...]

Plato’s Pious Prophecy of Modern Man in The Euthyphro

By Phillip N. Goggans|2019-09-12T13:52:54-05:00March 12th, 2015|Categories: Alexis de Tocqueville, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Classics, G.K. Chesterton, Modernity, Plato, Richard Weaver|

Modernism is an ancient phenomenon. If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then modernism is the world’s oldest heresy. Modernism’s essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity. Plato reveals them in his dialogue The Euthyphro. The character of Euthyphro is a prototype of modern man. In the dialogue Euthyphro is prosecuting [...]

Liberal Education Liberates

By Richard Weaver|2015-05-27T13:22:36-05:00January 5th, 2015|Categories: Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Richard Weaver|

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) was one of the leading thinkers of the post–World War II conservative intellectual movement. Best known for his landmark book Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver was a scholar and rhetorician who taught English at the University of Chicago for almost thirty years. Here he offers insights on the meaning and purpose of [...]

A Humane Economy versus Economism

By Ralph Ancil|2019-07-18T12:11:09-05:00September 5th, 2014|Categories: Economics, Featured, Politics, Ralph Ancil, Richard Weaver, Wilhelm Roepke|

Introduction Contributing to the multi-faceted crisis Americans now face is the loss of those values and principles that are essential to a healthy economy. We could mention the incestuous relationships between business and politics, the avarice of large banking institutions, misguided Federal Reserve policy, the irrationality of Wall Street investors, and the Gordon Gekko motto [...]

Ideas Have Consequences

By Nicholas Van Cleve|2014-06-30T00:39:33-05:00June 28th, 2014|Categories: Books, Neil Postman, Progressivism, Richard Weaver|

Richard Weaver introduces Ideas Have Consequences (1948) by explaining that at the root of “the dissolution of the West” is modern man’s denial of universal truth and his progressive assumption that “the most advanced point in time represents the point of highest development.” Enlightenment thought attacked transcendental truth via the battering rams of nominalism, empiricism, [...]