Richard Weaver’s ‘Ideas Have Consequences’ Remains a Conservative Classic

, more so than any postwar conservative intellectual, left behind countless quips that would have made great tweets, had he lived in a different era. “Progress makes father and child live in different worlds,” “the hero can never be a relativist,” “a liberal is one who doubts his premises even when he is proceeding on them,” and “the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting” rank among a few of the more memorable ones from 1948’s . Yet one senses that Weaver, given his aversion to such modern contrivances as jazz, automobiles, airplanes, the radio, and even tractors, would regard social media with greater disdain than any of his peers.

Yes, he periodically, and probably subconsciously, provided lines worthy of those other premature Twittericans Blaise Pascal and François de La Rochefoucauld. That aphoristic style more often than not yielded to denser, less crowd-pleasing prose that demanded intense concentration from the reader. Sifting out key themes of Ideas Have Consequences nevertheless requires little effort. The 190-page volume buttresses the notion of Eric Hoffer, a more deliberate conveyer of maxims, that “in the thin book the author reveals what he knows and in the thick book he tries to conceal what he does not know.” A sloppy reader might dismiss Ideas Have Consequences as a scattershot, “get-off-my-lawn” lament for the time beyond Weaver’s Southern boyhood with little else to unite it, save for its penchant for curmudgeonly complaint. The book offers the tight thesis that progress isn’t always so. One encounters therein a preference for the tradition of the experienced past over the promises of the imagined future, elitism over equality, truth over facts, and laborious quality over efficient quantity. For Weaver, “prejudice” was not a dirty word, but “relativism” was.

About the Author

Daniel J. Flynn

Daniel J. Flynn, the author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, is an American Spectator senior editor, visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, and YouTuber @RightWingWilderness.

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, more so than any postwar conservative intellectual, left behind countless quips that would have made great tweets, had he lived in a different era. “Progress makes father and child live in different worlds,” “the hero can never be a relativist,” “a liberal is one who doubts his premises even when he is proceeding on them,” and “the chief trouble with the contemporary generation is that it has not read the minutes of the last meeting” rank among a few of the more memorable ones from 1948’s . Yet one senses that Weaver, given his aversion to such modern contrivances as jazz, automobiles, airplanes, the radio, and even tractors, would regard social media with greater disdain than any of his peers.

Yes, he periodically, and probably subconsciously, provided lines worthy of those other premature Twittericans Blaise Pascal and François de La Rochefoucauld. That aphoristic style more often than not yielded to denser, less crowd-pleasing prose that demanded intense concentration from the reader. Sifting out key themes of Ideas Have Consequences nevertheless requires little effort. The 190-page volume buttresses the notion of Eric Hoffer, a more deliberate conveyer of maxims, that “in the thin book the author reveals what he knows and in the thick book he tries to conceal what he does not know.” A sloppy reader might dismiss Ideas Have Consequences as a scattershot, “get-off-my-lawn” lament for the time beyond Weaver’s Southern boyhood with little else to unite it, save for its penchant for curmudgeonly complaint. The book offers the tight thesis that progress isn’t always so. One encounters therein a preference for the tradition of the experienced past over the promises of the imagined future, elitism over equality, truth over facts, and laborious quality over efficient quantity. For Weaver, “prejudice” was not a dirty word, but “relativism” was.