Richard M. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, published 75 years ago, is not really a book about how ideas have consequences. It's a book about what one idea, propounded by the medieval friar William of Occam—"the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence"—has wrought through the ages.
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Like the more extreme voices on today's New Right, Weaver seemed to question whether liberal order was compatible with human flourishing. But by the end of his life—he died suddenly at the age of 53—his tune had changed. Individual liberty, he eventually realized, was more than incidental to the good society.
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Like many traditionalists, Weaver prioritized order above freedom. The chaos of the modern age struck him as a death sentence for Western civilization. "For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics," he wrote, "and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state."
That, at least, was how Weaver felt in 1948. Twelve years later, he published an essay on the similarities between conservatism and libertarianism that struck a different tone. Where the Weaver of Ideas Have Consequences was nonchalant about the use of government power, this Weaver took almost the opposite position.
"I maintain that the conservative in his proper character and role is a defender of liberty," he wrote in the May 1960 issue of The Individualist. "He is such because he takes his stand on the real order of things and because he has a very modest estimate of man's ability to change that order through the coercive power of the state."
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