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In 1948, as the West took stock of a world reshaped by war, American scholar Richard M. Weaver published Ideas Have Consequences. It was not a work of policy or politics, but of diagnosis—an attempt to trace cultural decline back to the ideas that made it possible.

I aim to revisit Weaver’s book (its arguments, its context, and its enduring relevance) through selected passages that capture his personal reflections on the state of play as he saw it.

Today’s entry is the foreword Weaver wrote sometime between 1959 and 1963, published posthumously in the 2013 expanded edition of Ideas Have Consequences.

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When Ideas Have Consequences was published in 1948, it met a response far beyond anything anticipated by the author. The book was written in the period immediately following the Second World War, and it was in a way a reaction to that war—to its immense destructiveness, to the strain it placed upon ethical principles, and to the tensions it left in place of the peace and order that were professedly sought. Its rhetorical note may perhaps be explained by this, but many people have written me to say that they found their own thoughts expressed in the book. I have therefore tried to understand its appeal by asking myself whether it can really be considered a work of philosophy.

It is a work of philosophy to the extent that it tries to analyze many features of modern disintegration by referring them to a first cause. This was a change that overtook the dominant philosophical thinking of the West in the fourteenth century, when the reality of transcendentals was first seriously challenged. To many readers this has been the most unsatisfactory part of the reasoning; but to others it has, seemingly, been the most convincing. I will merely say that something like this is necessary if one believes in the primacy of ideas. I was attempting a rigorous cause-and-effect analysis of the decline of belief in standards and values, and there must be a starting point.

I have come to feel increasingly, however, that it is not primarily a work of philosophy; it is rather an intuition of a situation. The intuition is of a world which has lost its center, which desires to believe again in value and obligation. But this world is not willing to realize how it has lost its belief or to face what it must accept in order to regain faith in an order of goods. The dilemma is very widely felt, and I imagine this accounts for the interest of the book to many persons who would not be at all happy with the political implications of some of the conclusions.

In a more general revision I would very probably change a few matters of emphasis and try to find less topical applications for some of the ideas. But I see no reason, after the lapse of more than a decade, to retreat from the general position of social criticism. It seems to me that the world is now more than ever dominated by the gods of mass and speed and that the worship of these can lead only to the lowering of standards, the adulteration of quality, and, in general, to the loss of those things which are essential to the life of civility and culture. The tendency to look with suspicion upon excellence, both intellectual and moral, as “undemocratic” shows no sign of diminishing.

The book was intended as a challenge to forces that threaten the foundations of civilization, and I am very happy to see it appear in a more accessible edition.

—Richard M. Weaver

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1948, a retrospective series drawn from Richard M. Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences.