A Man of Vision

Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences Fifty Years Later

by Robert A. Preston

I first read Ideas Have Consequences by Richard M. Weaver sometime in the late sixties. For me, being trained in scholastic philosophy, and always struggling to make the subject of metaphysics understandable and relevant to college students, it was an answer to prayers. For almost 30 years, Ideas has been a companion text to one of the traditional textbooks on Thomistic metaphysics in my course, and it has been a most happy marriage, at least for me, if not for my students. But I hope that I am not being unduly optimistic when I say that, for most of my students, Weaver became a guide to their understanding of what has gone wrong in a society they were now only beginning to examine. It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to discuss once again Ideas Have Consequences, this time from the perspective of 50 years after its publication, and to join with scholars who have a fuller knowledge of Weaver’s writings than I, to review the importance of this undeservedly little-known thinker for an understanding of the present age.

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