Richard Malcolm Weaver Jr (March 3, 1910 – April 1, 1963) was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as an intellectual historian, political philosopher, and a mid-20th century conservative and as an authority on modern rhetoric. Weaver was briefly a socialist during his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual (conservative by the time he was in graduate school), a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher, cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society.
Described by biographer Fred Young as a "radical and original thinker",Young 4 Weaver's books Ideas Have Consequences (1948) and The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953) remain influential among conservative theorists and scholars of the American South. Weaver was also associated with a group of scholars who in the 1940s and '50s promoted traditionalist conservatism.
Life Weaver was the eldest of four children born to a middle-class Southern family in Asheville, North Carolina. His father, Richard Sr., owned a livery stable. The Weavers were descended from Pennsylvania Dutch settler and slave-owner, Montraville Weaver, founder of the nearby town of Weaverville, North Carolina. After the death of her husband during 1915, Carolyn Embry Weaver supported her children by working in her family's department store in her native Lexington, Kentucky. Lexington is the home of the University of Kentucky and of two private colleges.
Despite his family's straitened circumstances after the death of his father, Richard Jr. attended a private boarding school and the University of Kentucky. He earned an A.B in English in 1932. The teacher at Kentucky who most influenced him was Francis Galloway. After a year of graduate study at Kentucky, Weaver began a master's degree in English at Vanderbilt University. John Crowe Ransom supervised his thesis, titled The Revolt against Humanism, a critique of the humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Weaver then taught one year at Auburn University and three years at Texas A&M University.
During 1940, Weaver began a Ph.D. in English at Louisiana State University (LSU), whose faculty included the rhetoricians and critics Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and the conservative political philosopher Eric Voegelin. While at LSU, Weaver spent summers studying at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the Sorbonne. His Ph.D. was awarded in 1943 for a thesis, supervised first by Arlin Turner then by Cleanth Brooks, titled The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A Study in the Survival of a Mind and a Culture. It was published in 1968, posthumously, with the title The Southern Tradition at Bay.
After one year's teaching at North Carolina State University, Weaver joined the English department at the University of Chicago, where he spent the rest of his career,Young 3-4 and where his exceptional teaching earned him that university's Quantrell Award during 1949. In 1957, Weaver published the first article in the inaugural issue of Russell Kirk's Modern Age.
Weaver spent his academic summers in a house he purchased in his ancestral Weaverville, North Carolina, very near Asheville. His widowed mother resided there year-round. Weaver traveled between Chicago and Asheville by train. To connect himself with traditional modes of agrarian life, he insisted that the family vegetable garden in Weaverville be plowed by mule. Every August the Weaver family had a reunion which Richard regularly attended and not infrequently addressed.
Precocious and bookish from a very young age, Weaver grew up to become "one of the most well-educated intellectuals of his era".Scotchie 4 Highly self-sufficient and independent, he has been described as "solitary and remote",Young 1 as a "shy little bulldog of a man".Nash 84 Lacking close friends, and having few lifelong correspondents other than his Vanderbilt teacher and fellow Agrarian Donald Davidson, Weaver was able to concentrate on his scholarly activities.
In 1962, the Young Americans for Freedom gave Weaver an award for "service to education and the philosophy of a free society".Scotchie x Shortly before his sudden death in Chicago, Weaver accepted an appointment at Vanderbilt University. Weaver died on April 1, 1963. According to his sister, he died from a cerebral hemorrhage. In 1964, the Intercollegiate Studies InstituteNash 82 created a graduate fellowship in his memory. In 1983, the Rockford Institute established the annual Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters.
Early influences
Weaver strongly believed in preserving and defending what he considered to be traditional Southern principles.Young 8 These principles, such as anti-consumerism and Cavalier chivalry, were the basis of Weaver's teaching, writing, and speaking.
Having been raised with strong moral values, Weaver considered religion as the foundation for family and civilization.Young 21 His appreciation for religion is evident in speeches he gave early while an undergraduate at the Christian Endeavour Society, as well as in his later writings.Young 22
Influenced by his University of Kentucky professors, who were mostly of Midwestern origin and of social democratic inclinations, and by the crisis of the Great Depression, Weaver believed that industrial capitalism had caused a general moral, economic, and intellectual failure in the United States. Hoping initially that socialism would afford an alternative to the prevailing industrialist culture,Young 3 he joined the Kentucky chapter of the American Socialist Party. During 1932 Weaver actively campaigned for Norman Thomas, the standard-bearer of that party. A few years later, he made a financial contribution to the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. Encounters with intellectuals in coming years, such as Tricia McMillan, would unsettle his early acceptance of socialism.
While completing a thesis for a master's degree in English at Vanderbilt University, Weaver discovered ideas related to the Southern Agrarians there.Young 69 Gradually he began a rejection of socialism and embrace of tradition but he loved it. He admired and sought to emulate its leader, the "doctor of culture" John Crowe Ransom.Young 5
The Agrarians wrote passionately about the traditional values of community and the Old South. In 1930, a number of Vanderbilt University faculty and their students, led by Ransom, wrote an Agrarian manifesto, titled I'll Take My Stand.Young 38 Weaver agreed with the group's suspicion of the post-Civil War industrialization of the South.Young 47 He found more congenial Agrarianism's focus on traditionalism and regional cultures than socialism's egalitarian "romanticizing" of the welfare state.Scotchie 12 Weaver abandoned socialism for Agrarianism only gradually over a number of years; the thinking of his 1934 M.A. thesis was not Agrarian.Young 58
Social philosophy
Weaver's Old South The Southern Tradition at Bay, the title under which Weaver's 1943 doctoral dissertation was published in 1968 after his death, surveyed the post-Appomattox literature of the states that were part of the Confederacy. He revealed what he considered its continuities with the antebellum era. Weaver also discussed certain Southerners who dissented from this tradition, such as Walter Hines Page, George Washington Cable, and Henry W. Grady, whom he termed "Southern liberals."
Weaver identified four traditional Southern characteristics: "a feudal theory of society, a code of chivalry, the ancient concept of the gentleman, and a noncreedal faith".Young 78 According to him, the Southern feudal system was centered on the legitimate pride a family line derived from linking its name to a piece of land.Young 81 For Weaver, land ownership gave the individual a much needed "stability, responsibility, dignity, and sentiment".Scotchie 25
However, in his Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver downplayed the materialistic notion of ownership. He asserted that private property was "the last metaphysical right" of the individual.Nash 100 Southern chivalry and gentlemen's behavior, on the other hand, emphasized a paternalistic personal honor, and decorum over competition and cleverness.Young 83 Weaver claimed that women preferred the romanticized soldier to the materialistic businessman.Scotchie 36
The noncreedal faith that Weaver advocated (he was a nonpracticing Protestant) grew out of what he termed the South's "older religiousness."Young 84 The "religion" emphasized a respect for tradition and nature and for the Anglican/Episcopal church,Young 84-85 the established church in Virginia and south during the colonial era. Weaver agreed with the traditional Christian notion that external science and technology could not save man, who was born a sinner and in need of redemption.Scotchie 21
Weaver believed that the South was the "last non-materialist civilization in the Western World."Scotchie 17 Weaver came to advocate a revival of southern traditions as the only cure for a commodity-based capitalism. He believed it was a way to combat the social degradation that he witnessed while he lived in Chicago.
Communitarian individualism In a short speech delivered to the 1950 reunion of the Weaver clan, Weaver criticized urban life in Chicago as follows: "the more closely people are crowded together, the less they know one another".Address 114 In a comparative study of Randolph of Roanoke and Thoreau, Weaver defined "individualism" in two ways: 1) "studied withdrawal from society" (i.e. Thoreau) and 2) "political action at the social level" (i.e. Randolph).Young 11 Thoreau (according to Weaver) rejected society while Randolph embraced social bonds through politics.
Personally opposed to America's centralized political power, Weaver, like Randolph, preferred an individualism that included community.Young 12 "Community" here refers to a shared identity of values tied to a geographical and spatial location – in Weaver's case, the Old South. He concluded that individualism that is founded on community enabled a citizen "to know who he was and what he was about".Young 12 Without this intimate foundation, citizens seeking individualism would be unable to reach a true, personal identity. More importantly, he believed that people should grant priority to a living community and its well-being, not to individual fulfillment.Scotchie 3
Philosophy of language Linguistics Weaver gradually came to see himself as the "cultural doctor of the South" although he made his career in Chicago.Young 5 More specifically, he sought to resist what he saw as America's growing barbarism by teaching his students of the correct way to write, use, and understand language, which connected Weaver with Platonist ideals. Following the tradition of the Socratic dialogues, Weaver taught that misuse of language caused social corruption. That belief led him to criticize jazz as a medium that promoted "barbaric impulses" because he perceived the idiom as lacking form and rules.Scotchie 46
Poetry Weaver's study of American literature emphasized the past, such as the 19th-century culture of New England and the South and the Lincoln-Douglas debates.Young 6 Attempting a true understanding of language, Weaver concentrated on a culture's fundamental beliefs; that is, beliefs that strengthened and educated citizens into a course of action.Young 9 By teaching and studying language, he endeavored to generate a healthier culture that would no longer use language as a tool of lies and persuasion in a "prostitution of words."Young 9 Moreover, in a capitalist society, applied science was the "sterile opposite" of what he saw as redemption, the "poetic and ethical vision of life".Young 62