Ideas Have Consequences

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948. First edition. Octavo. Original boards and dust jacket (not price-clipped). One-inch closed tear to foot of front jacket and small sticker stain to head of rear jacket panel, minor edgewear and toning to the dust jacket, else a fine first edition in a very good-plus dust jacket.. Exceptional first edition of Richard Weaver's (1910-1963) seminal work on the decline of the West and the consequences of its movement away from philosophical realism in favor of moral and intellectual relativism. Weaver was an American professor of English and rhetoric at the University of Chicago and a conservative intellectual in the Southern tradition. Weaver earned his degree in English in 1932 from the University of Kentucky and thereafter pursued his master's degree in English at Vanderbilt University, where John Crowe Ransom supervised his thesis, The Revolt Against Humanism-a critique of the humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. He would later pursue a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, home to Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks as well as the great political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Weaver was awarded his Ph.D. in 1943 after completing his dissertation under the great critic Cleanth Brooks-a complex work about the postbellum American South that was published (posthumously) in 1968 as The Southern Tradition at Bay. Weaver believed that capitalism was to blame for many of modern America's moral, economic, and intellectual failures, and as a result he was early drawn to socialism as a potential alternative to the reigning consumerist and industrialist culture. However, after joining the American Socialist Party, Weaver fell away from socialism and, while at Vanderbilt, encountered the ideas of the Southern Agrarians. In the years that followed Weaver would come to embrace the Agrarian emphasis on traditionalism, and he would ultimately identify himself as the "Cultural Doctor of the South" (despite making his academic home at the University of Chicago). Ideas Have Consequences was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948-although the title was reportedly (and perhaps fatefully) foisted upon Weaver by his editor. This now classic work of conservative intellectual thought sets forth Weaver's diagnosis of modernity's illness, an affliction that he locates in the West's adoption of philosophical nominalism and its attendant relativism. Written with wit, zeal, and crackling prose, Ideas struck a chord upon its publication at the height of America's post-war optimism. Weaver's book greatly influenced the postwar intellectual right, including conservatism's leading lights Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Willmoore Kendall, and it was named by National Review as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of the twentieth century. First editions of Weaver's classic are increasingly rare in this condition.