Richard M. Weaver - Weaver's Influence

Weaver's Influence

Some regard The Southern Tradition at Bay as Weaver's best work. Ideas Have Consequences is more widely known, thanks to its substantial influence on the "postwar intellectual Right" (Nash 87). 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 (Young 179). Publisher Henry Regnery claims that the book gave the modern conservative movement a strong intellectual foundation (Nash 82). A key libertarian theorist of the 1960s – and former Communist Party USA member – Frank S. Meyer, publicly thanked Weaver for inspiring him to join the Right (Nash 88).

For liberal relativists, Weaver was a misguided authoritarian. For conservatives, he was a champion of tradition and liberty, with the emphasis on tradition. For Southerners, he was a refreshing defender of an "antimodern" South (Nash 108). His refutation of what Russell Kirk termed "ritualistic liberalism" (Nash 87) struck a chord with conservative intellectuals. Stemming from a tradition of "cultural pessimism" (Nash 92), his critique of nominalism, however startling, gave conservatives a new philosophical direction. His writing attacked the growing number of modern Americans denying conservative structure and moral uprightness by replacing them with naive relativism. In the 1980s, the emerging paleoconservatives adapted his vision of the Old South to express antimodernism (Nash 109). Weaver has come to be seen as defining America's plight and as inspiring conservatives to find "the relationship between faith and reason for an age that does not know the meaning of faith" (Toledano 259).