Turning the Clock Back
It is unjust that Richard M. Weaver (1910–63) is so ill-remembered today. In his lifetime, the North Carolina-born University of Chicago professor was hailed by thinkers as different as Russell Kirk and Frank Meyer as one of the conservative movement’s great progenitors; indeed, it would be no exaggeration to call Weaver one of the movement’s greatest teachers. Especially in his National Review essays and his bestselling 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver gave postwar conservatives an intellectual and moral scaffolding for understanding their fight against ideology. He defined conservatism as a distinct philosophic position. In so doing, Weaver became among the earliest thinkers to demonstrate to the reading public how relativism, centralism, and radical egalitarianism hollowed out the moral core of a free society.
Insofar as Weaver is remembered now, however, it is often as a mere caricature. Despite his early influence, he was a rather solitary man, and, unlike his University of Chicago colleagues F. A. Hayek and Leo Strauss, he left behind no distinct school of conservative followers dedicated to promoting his ideas or interpreting his works. As a result, Weaver’s works have often been subjected to uncharitable treatments by left-wing writers (some of which have been ably challenged of late) and superficial citations by right-wingers. Often, both approaches rely on little more than simplistic readings of Ideas Have Consequences—often not moving far beyond the provocative title—and tend to portray Weaver as a hardcore reactionary, even a prophet of authoritarianism responsible for the Right’s illiberal turn.
But when Weaver spoke of “turning the clock back,” he was by no means calling for the kind of despotic measures deployed by extremists of the Right throughout the twentieth century. True, he sought the counter-revolutionary restoration of Western civilization over and against the socialism and liberalism that dominated his time; but he believed that such a goal could never be achieved by coercive, centralized power. For Weaver, the defense of tradition must always be married to the defense of liberty—one cannot be understood without the other, and both must be rooted in the pursuit of truth. For this reason, he offers a far more solid ground for the humane pluralism that must characterize a free and responsible society than the schemes of uniformity propounded by ideologues of any stripe, including reactionary rightists, revolutionary leftists, or supposedly “centrist” liberals.
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