Ideas Have Consequences

Summary

Ideas Have Consequences is a short work of cultural criticism by Richard M. Weaver, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948. Written in the aftermath of the Second World War, it argues that the disorders of the modern West are not accidents but the results of a mistaken philosophical choice made centuries earlier, and it proposes a few modest steps toward recovery. Weaver locates the turning point in the late Middle Ages, in the nominalism associated with William of Ockham. Nominalism denied that universals, such as the ideas of justice or of a kind of thing, are real; only particular things exist, and general terms are just names. Weaver argues that this denial cut the link between the world of experience and any transcendent standard of truth. Once there were no real universals, truth came to be found only in sensory experience, man came to be seen as a product of nature rather than a being with an end beyond it, and in the end each person's feelings became the measure of value. The central chapters describe the consequences Weaver sees in modern life: the loss of a sense of distinction and hierarchy, which he believes every healthy society needs; the fragmentation of knowledge into specialties; egotism in work and art; the 'Great Stereopticon' of press, film and radio, which projects a manufactured picture of the world; and a 'spoiled-child psychology' that expects comfort without effort. He criticizes modern jazz and some modern art as symptoms of this condition, judgments that later readers have often found unfair. Weaver's remedies are deliberately limited. He defends private property, especially small, independent property, as 'the last metaphysical right', because it gives the individual a sphere free from the state and from mass organization. He calls for a restoration of respect for language and for the precise meanings of words, and for piety toward nature, toward one's neighbors and toward the past. The book sold well for a work of philosophy and became, with Kirk's The Conservative Mind, one of the founding texts of postwar American conservatism. The title, chosen by the publisher, has passed into common use. Critics at the time found it nostalgic and sweeping, while admirers have praised its seriousness about the link between ideas and culture.

Top Lessons

• Ideas behind culture

  Weaver argues that philosophical ideas, even abstract ones, shape how ordinary people live. Students can look for ideas behind everyday habits.

• The power of words

  Weaver, a teacher of rhetoric, believes that careless language weakens thought and community. The book invites attention to the precise use of words.

• Property and independence

  Weaver defends small private property as a protection for personal independence. The argument connects economics with moral life.

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