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

The Closing of the Western Mind

By Jacob Williams|2021-05-10T19:45:54-05:00January 19th, 2018|Categories: Conservatism, Culture, Culture War, Freedom, History, Modernity, Richard Weaver, Roger Scruton|

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… Last year marked the thirtieth anniversary of Allan Bloom’s [...]

Beauty Will Save the World

By Gregory Wolfe|2021-05-26T16:53:32-05:00December 10th, 2017|Categories: Art, Beauty, Books, Christianity, Conservatism, Culture, Imagination, Modernity, Religion, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, The Imaginative Conservative, Timeless Essays|

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 glimpse. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series [...]

The Agrarianism of Richard Weaver: Beginnings & Completions

By M.E. Bradford|2019-06-17T15:43:45-05:00December 9th, 2017|Categories: Civil Society, Community, Conservatism, Featured, History, M. E. Bradford, Richard Weaver, Southern Agrarians, The Imaginative Conservative|

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, while yet living Richard M. Weaver was something of a puzzle for his friends within the American “conservative [...]

Up From Liberalism

By Richard Weaver|2021-02-03T16:40:50-06:00November 13th, 2017|Categories: Conservatism, Culture, Education, Featured, Liberal Learning, Liberalism, Literature, Philosophy, Richard Weaver, Southern Agrarians, The Imaginative Conservative|

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 cobwebs in his own corner. My experience has brought home to me the wisdom in [...]

The Cultivation of Complexity: Reading Wendell Berry

By Josh Herring|2021-04-28T15:04:31-05:00July 13th, 2017|Categories: Aristotle, Civilization, Featured, Liberal Learning, Richard Weaver, Social Order, Southern Agrarians, 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 last knowledge of forestry:/what, without permanent damage,/can be spared and carefully removed,/leaving the whole forest whole. This learning/’takes decades. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]