Tag: Richard Weaver

2,816 words

Padraig Martin, ed.
The Honorable Cause: A Free South –12 Southern Essays
Self-published, 2023

In concluding his great work The Southern Tradition at Bay, which was published five years after the author’s death in 1968, Richard Weaver leaves us with some truly haunting words: “The South which entered the twentieth century had largely ceased to be a fighting South.”

Although this statement was false in a literal sense, since throughout the twentieth century the American South had provided the United States military some of its best fighting men, it was true in that these men had largely ceased fighting as Southerners. (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

681 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

4,143 words

After nearly 20 years of exile in New York City, I recently returned home to the South. I went to New York for a job and arrived full of hope, delighted at the prospect of a new life in “the greatest city in the world.” My preconceptions about the city were almost all positive, and, as I later discovered, heavily romanticized. (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

671 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

2,309 words

Richard Weaver
The Ethics of Rhetoric
Muriwai Books, 2017 (1953).

The great task that lies ahead of us is to persuade our people of the rightness of our ideas. It behooves us, then, to study the art of rhetoric, or persuasion. Richard Weaver’s The Ethics of Rhetoric is a rigorous and intelligent introduction to this vanishing art. (more…)

1,582 words

Richard M. Weaver
Edited by George M. Curtis, III and James J. Thompson, Jr.
The Southern Essays of Richard M. Weaver
Indianapolis, Indiana: Liberty Fund, 1987

Richard Weaver is known for two notable ideas that need to be emphasized. First, he proposed that there is an objective truth, not many truths. Second, he said that things that were true or good in the past are still true and good today. (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

671 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

7,566 words

Richard M. Weaver
Ideas Have Consequences
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948
Expanded edition, with a Foreword by Roger Kimball and an Afterword by Ted J. Smith III, 2013.

The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture …. (more…)

4,517 words

Richard Weaver
The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought
New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1968

Richard Weaver’s The Southern Tradition at Bay has grown in both poignancy and meaning since its posthumous publishing in 1968. Originally Weaver’s 1943 doctoral dissertation at Louisiana State University, this work offers a survey of the most important postbellum literature produced by Southern writers until 1910 and ties it together with a philosopher’s breadth of vision. (more…)

1,947 words

There are great thinkers, and then there are great thinkers whose prescience is so acute that they seem to operate on a precognitive, almost prophetic level. Included among the latter category is Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963). Weaver was a professor of English at the University of Chicago when the humanities were taken seriously, and nowhere were they taken more seriously than at UC in the two decades following the end of the Second World War. (more…)