Richard M. Weaver
Weaver was briefly a socialist during his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual (conservative by the time he was in graduate school), a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher, cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society.
Described by biographer Fred Young as a "radical and original thinker",[1] Weaver's books Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) remain influential among conservative theorists and scholars of the American South.
After the death of her husband during 1915, Carolyn Embry Weaver supported her children by working in her family's department store in her native Lexington, Kentucky.
During 1940, Weaver began a Ph.D. in English at Louisiana State University (LSU), whose faculty included the rhetoricians and critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and the conservative political philosopher Eric Voegelin.
His Ph.D. was awarded in 1943 for a thesis, supervised first by Arlin Turner then by Cleanth Brooks, titled The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture.
To connect himself with traditional modes of agrarian life, he insisted that the family vegetable garden in Weaverville be plowed by mule.
[5] Lacking close friends, and having few lifelong correspondents other than his Vanderbilt teacher and fellow Agrarian Donald Davidson, Weaver was able to concentrate on his scholarly activities.
[12] Influenced by his University of Kentucky professors, who were mostly of Midwestern origin and of social democratic inclinations, and by the crisis of the Great Depression, Weaver believed that industrial capitalism had caused a general moral, economic, and intellectual failure in the United States.
Hoping initially that socialism would afford an alternative to the prevailing industrialist culture,[13] he joined the Kentucky chapter of the American Socialist Party.
While completing a thesis for a master's degree in English at Vanderbilt University, Weaver discovered ideas related to the Southern Agrarians there.
In 1930, a number of Vanderbilt University faculty and their students, led by Ransom, wrote an Agrarian manifesto, titled I'll Take My Stand.
[19] Defunct Newspapers Journals TV channels Websites Other Congressional caucuses Economics Gun rights Identity politics Nativist Religion Watchdog groups Youth/student groups Miscellaneous Other The Southern Tradition at Bay, the title under which Weaver's 1943 doctoral dissertation was published in 1968 after his death, surveyed the post-Appomattox literature of the states that were part of the Confederacy.
Weaver identified four traditional Southern characteristics: "a feudal theory of society, a code of chivalry, the ancient concept of the gentleman, and a noncreedal faith".
[20] According to him, the Southern feudal system was centered on the legitimate pride a family line derived from linking its name to a piece of land.
Weaver agreed with the traditional Christian notion that external science and technology could not save man, who was born a sinner and in need of redemption.
Personally opposed to America's centralized political power, Weaver, like Randolph, preferred an individualism that included community.
[32] "Community" here refers to a shared identity of values tied to a geographical and spatial location – in Weaver's case, the Old South.
[35] More specifically, he sought to resist what he saw as America's growing barbarism by teaching his students of the correct way to write, use, and understand language, which connected Weaver with Platonist ideals.
That belief led him to criticize jazz as a medium that promoted "barbaric impulses" because he perceived the idiom as lacking form and rules.
[46] He also agreed with Plato's notions of the realities of transcendentals (recall Weaver's hostility to nominalism) and the connection between form and substance.
Arguments grounded in mere circumstance ("I have to quit school because I cannot afford the tuition") Weaver viewed as the least ethical, because they grant the immediate facts a higher status than principle.
[59] Upon hearing a "god" or "devil" term, Weaver suggested that a listener should "hold a dialectic with himself" to consider the intention behind such persuasive words.
That is, a civilization that no longer believed in universal transcendental values had no moral ambition to understand a higher truth outside of man.
Moreover, without a focus on the sort of higher truth that can be found in organized religions, people turned to the more tangible idols of science and materialism.
Weaver's ideal society was that of the European Middle Ages, when the Roman Catholic Church gave to all an accurate picture of reality and truth.
More generally, Weaver felt that the shift from universal truth and transcendental order to individual opinion and industrialism adversely affected the moral health of Americans.
[69] Continuing in this direction, he claimed not to understand the feminist movement, which led women to abandon their stronger connection to nature and intuition for a superficial political and economic equality with men.
[74] The leading young conservative intellectuals of the era, including Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Willmoore Kendall, praised the book for its critical insights.
[76] Frank S. Meyer, a libertarian theorist of the 1960s – and former Communist Party USA member – publicly thanked Weaver for inspiring him to join the Right.
His writing attacked the growing number of modern Americans denying conservative structure and moral uprightness, confronting them with empirical functionalism.
