Richard Weaver

Overview:
Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr (March 3, 1910 – April 1, 1963) was an American scholar who taught English at the University of Chicago. He is primarily known as an intellectual historian, political philosopher and a shaper of mid-20th century conservatism and as an authority on modern rhetoric. Weaver was briefly a socialist in his youth, a lapsed leftist intellectual (conservative by the time he was in graduate school), a teacher of composition, a Platonist philosopher, cultural critic, and a theorist of human nature and society. Described by biographer Fred Young (1995: 4) as a “radical and original thinker,” Richard Weaver’s books Ideas Have Consequences and The Ethics of Rhetoric remain influential among conservative theorists and scholars of the American South. Weaver was also associated with the “New Conservatives,” a group of scholars who in the 1940s and 1950s promoted traditionalist conservatism.