Ideas Have Consequences Turns 75

Richard M. Weaver seemed to question whether liberal order was compatible with human flourishing. By the end of his life, he saw individual liberty as more than incidental to the good society.

Richard M. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, published 75 years ago, is not really a book about how ideas have consequences. It's a book about what one idea, propounded by the medieval friar William of Occam—"the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence"—has wrought through the ages.

In Weaver's view, the answer was nothing good. Occam's nominalist philosophy has produced a squishy relativism that rejects objective morality and a blindered materialism that doubts the validity of anything that can't be empirically measured. It has led us to undervalue community, eschew tradition, and forget that rights are accompanied by duties. Weaver's book, the title of which became an anthem of mid-century American conservatism, was an attempt to revive the notion "that there is a world of ought, that the apparent does not exhaust the real." But mostly it was a catalog of complaints against modernity.

Like the more extreme voices on today's New Right, Weaver seemed to question whether liberal order was compatible with human flourishing. But by the end of his life—he died suddenly at the age of 53—his tune had changed. Individual liberty, he eventually realized, was more than incidental to the good society.

The Weaver of Ideas Have Consequences could be insightful, even prophetic. He could also be a curmudgeon, dismissing jazz music as "the clearest of all signs of our age's deep-seated predilection for barbarism" and lamenting, at length, that "woman has increasingly gone into the world as an economic 'equal' and therefore competitor of man." (He describes working women making "a drab pilgrimage from two-room apartment to job to divorce court" and posits that "woman will regain her superiority when again she finds privacy in the home and becomes, as it were, a priestess radiating the power of proper sentiment.")

Weaver's politics were, if anything, even more eyebrow raising than his cultural critique. Ideas Have Consequences was published in 1948, a moment that was closer to the Bolshevik Revolution than to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Few people then entertained the possibility that the Cold War might culminate in the total defeat of the USSR, but it's plain the idea would have struck Weaver as downright delusional. The text of the book is replete with suggestions that the Soviets understood, as the West did not, the necessity of controlling their population, including through censorship.

"The Russians, with their customary logical realism, which ought to come as a solemn admonition to the Western mind, have concluded that freedom to initiate conflicts is not one of the legitimate freedoms," he wrote, not exactly disapprovingly. "They have therefore established state control of journalism. If newspapers can do nothing but lie, they will at least lie in the interest of the state, which, according to the philosophy of statism, is not lying at all. Certainly it remains to be seen whether the Western democracies with their strong divisive forces can continue to allow a real freedom of the press."

Weaver likewise believed there was something to be said for a command-and-control economy. Modern man is weak and decadent, he thought—spoiled by a rotten culture and lacking the self-discipline to do great things. Left to their own devices, then, Americans would surely opt for ever more leisure and ever less work. Communism at least offered a response: "The Russians with habitual clarity of purpose have made their choice," he wrote. "There is to be discipline, and it is to be enforced by the elite controlling the state."

Could a free society hope to outcompete such a system? Weaver appeared to doubt it. "There seems to remain only the question of whether the West will allow comfort to soften it to a point at which defeat is assured," he wrote, "or whether it will accept the rule of hardness and discover means of discipline." If the latter route were followed, "personality will hardly survive," he acknowledged. "The individual will be told that the state is moving to guarantee his freedom, as in a sense it will be; but, to do so, it must prohibit individual indulgence and even responsibility. To give strength to its will, the state restricts the wills of its citizens. This is a general formula of political organization."

Like many traditionalists, Weaver prioritized order above freedom. The chaos of the modern age struck him as a death sentence for Western civilization. "For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics," he wrote, "and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state."

That, at least, was how Weaver felt in 1948. Twelve years later, he published an essay on the similarities between conservatism and libertarianism that struck a different tone. Where the Weaver of Ideas Have Consequences was nonchalant about the use of government power, this Weaver took almost the opposite position.

"I maintain that the conservative in his proper character and role is a defender of liberty," he wrote in the May 1960 issue of The Individualist. "He is such because he takes his stand on the real order of things and because he has a very modest estimate of man's ability to change that order through the coercive power of the state."

In one particularly striking passage, Weaver drew what he saw as a crucial distinction between persuasion and compulsion. "There is a difference between trying to reform your fellow beings by the normal processes of logical demonstration, appeal, and moral suasion—there is a difference between that and passing over to the use of force or constraint," he wrote. "The former is something all of us engage in every day. The latter is what makes the modern radical dangerous and perhaps in a sense demented. His first thought now is to get control of the state to make all men equal or make all men rich, or failing that to make all men equally unhappy. This use of political instrumentality to coerce people to conform with his dream…is our reason, I think, for objecting to the radical."

What accounted for this change of heart? Like certain members of today's illiberal right, Weaver was ideologically promiscuous throughout his life, flirting with socialism during college, adopting a Southern agrarian outlook early in his career, and cementing his place as a leading traditionalist—the "captain of the anti-liberal team," according to his fellow conservative Willmoore Kendall—with Ideas Have Consequences.

That remains his best-known work, but something happened in the years after the book's publication: a new philosophical synthesis emerged, defended by writers such as Frank S. Meyer and M. Stanton Evans in the pages of newly launched journals like National Review. This "fusion" of conservatism and libertarianism was quickly adopted on much of the American right, becoming the foundation upon which the conservative movement as we know it was built. It held that liberty and virtue were mutually reinforcing—and that government's sole purpose was to protect our freedom, while our job was to use that freedom to pursue the higher things in life.

Within a dozen years, Weaver went from questioning whether liberal democracy could survive to exhorting conservatives, in thoroughly fusionist fashion, that when someone "tries to use the instrumentality of the state to bring about his wishes…we have to take our stand." Perhaps ideas really do have consequences.