Barbarians in the Saddle: Intellectual Biography of Richard M. Weaver by Joseph Scotchie

Author:Joseph Scotchie [Scotchie, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Conservatism & Liberalism, General
ISBN: 9781560003212
Google: _DjSDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 5668
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1997-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Like the conservatism he helped to found, Weaver’s cause was to dismantle a destructuve Leviathan state and replace it with all the proper functions of the Old Republic. A constitution that protected the integrity of regional cultures and acknowledged man’s evil instincts, the aristocracy of achievement, and a nation made by frontiersmen and yeoman farmers—that was Richard Weaver’s America. By assailing the charasmatic term “US,” the man from Weaverville is describing a nation he could no longer recognize—and also one he held little hope for.

Rhetoric, even in its basest form, matters. The twentieth-century Left vigorously supported a large and activist state and conservatives put up no real political opposition. Weaver despised the conformity of the 1950s and looked elsewhere for the American ideal. When he compares the “ruggedness and self-sufficiency” of the American pioneer to the apartment dweller in megalopolis, Weaver is saying that we have not only lost our freedom, worse yet, we don’t even know what the term once signified. Americans were hardly living strenuously or romantically in the 1950s. To make matters worse, the ultimate terms worked to smear dissent, create false gods, cut off serious debate on important philosophical issues and basically assure us that Big Brother is working diligently for our own good. Such a rhetorical campaign has achieved an all-too-easy success.

The Ethics of Rhetoric was less well received than Ideas Have Consequences. Still, it consolidated Weaver’s position as one of the leading lights of the intellectual Right. Reviewing the book along with Robert Nisbet’s The Quest for Community, Russell Kirk praised Weaver as “one of the most courageous men in America.” According to Kirk, the value of The Ethics of Rhetoric was its unswerving devotion to truthful rhetoric, as opposed to language as a “mere device for expression of sensations.” Kirk added that distinguishing “god” terms from the true meaning of words and also “distinguishing Economic Man from the civil social person,” would, if successful, hold enormous benefits; mainly, in creating civil societies that “prefer Justice over a dubious ‘Efficiency.’”20

Thomas Landess was even more effusive. Many years later, he wrote that the book has the power to “alter the thinking of an entire generation”; its value being that “rhetoric and thought go hand in hand and that together they constitute the most vital informing force in the political order.”21

Both Kirk and Landess allude to Weaver’s search for truth in the ultimate terms that define our culture. A serious debate on the meaning of democracy, freedom and the uses of a bureaucracy might lead the country back to its founding principles. But as Weaver noted many times, a great orator needs a great audience. If truth in the ultimate terms were ever debated, it would first have to be received by a virtuous people.

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