Plato’s ideas had consequences: appropriations of Greek thought in the post-war conservatism of Richard Weaver

Abstract

Now largely forgotten outside the American conservative movement, Richard Weaver’s Ideas have Consequences (1948) was an important conservative work published after World War II, cited as a formative influence by a number of key figures on the Right. This paper examines an important but neglected aspect of Weaver’s work: his choice of Greek models, including those he idealized, downplayed, or subverted. Weaver argued that the West has been in decline since the Middle Ages due to its rejection of Platonic philosophy. In Weaver’s narrative, the consequent lack of moral absolutes epitomized modern liberalism. The symptoms of relativism were aggravated by urbanization and technological progress, and a reversion to the supposed simplicity of the past, physically and spiritually, was necessary for America’s revival. Whereas Aristotle’s ideas about democracies dominated by farmers better complemented Weaver’s agrarianism, his influence on early science made him a deeply suspicious proto-modern thinker to Weaver. Instead, Weaver appropriated Plato’s philosophy of absolutes and apparent elitism, but the seemingly communistic aspects of Plato’s Republic made him an uncomfortable fit with Weaver’s antipathy to the left. These complex classical appropriations shed significant light on a seminal thinker from the birth of modern American conservatism.