by Richard M. Weaver
190pp
Around here we advocate and promote a way of life known as agrarianism. As a philosophy, agrarianism was explored in detail during the early 20th century by a collection of Southern scholars, among them Richard Weaver. Weaver’s life work was centered on understanding and contrasting two very different ways of life, the ways that American life was viewed and conducted in the North versus the South. His first major writing was his doctoral thesis, eventually published as The Southern Tradition at Bay, in which he made the case that the American South, as it existed prior to the Civil War, was an entirely different culture from the North—that it was in fact another country. The thesis was a eulogy for a way of life that Weaver thought was superior, but which had been mostly eradicated by the early 1940s.
Weaver tried for years to have his thesis published as a book, with no success. Finally, a friend at the University of Chicago Press told him that, although there would be no interest in a eulogy for the antebellum South, if he would use his ideas to craft a corresponding critique of the North, it would be publishable. Thus was born Ideas Have Consequences. Of all our offerings at Cumberland Books, Ideas Have Consequences is by far the most difficult to read. Not because the prose is dense or turgid—on the contrary, Richard Weaver writes in a spare and lucid manner—but because Weaver’s observations are so thought-provoking that it is a challenge to make it through a single paragraph without having to set down the book and think for awhile about what you’ve just read.
Read superficially (which is a fine way to read it), Ideas Have Consequences presents a provocative diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. If you are troubled that modern progress isn’t all we expected it to be, Weaver shows clearly that the results of modern thinking aren’t merely disappointing but disastrous—and that they are an inevitable consequence of the thinking that produced them.
But take the time to read a bit more deeply, keeping in mind the book’s history. As Weaver examines, dismantles, and discards the conceits of life in the industrial North, you’ll detect lurking in the background the outlines of another, better way of living—one which actually existed in this country before 1861. A review of the book
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From the back cover:
“In what has become a classic work, Richard M. Weaver unsparingly diagnoses the ills of our age and offers a realistic remedy. He asserts that the world is intelligible, and that man is free. The catastophres of our age are the product not of necessity but of unintelligent choice. A cure, he submits, is possible. It lies in the right use of man's reason, in the renewed acceptance of an absolute reality, and in the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences.”
“This deeply prophetic book not only launched the renaissance of philosophical conservatism in this country, but in the process gave us an armory of insights into the diseases besetting the national community that is as timely today as when it first appeared. Ideas Have Consequences is one of the few authentic classics in the American political tradition.”
Robert Nisbet
author,
The Quest for Community
“Brilliantly written, daring and radical .... It will shock, and philosophical shock is the beginning of wisdom.”
Paul Tillich
“A profound diagnosis of the sickness of our culture.”
Reinhold Niehbur
“Richard Weaver's book is important; his explanation of the breakdown of modern man is the best in years.”
John Crowe Ransom