Bøker av Richard M. Weaver

While Richard M. Weaver is best known for the classic Ideas Have Consequences, the foundation of his career was this study of his native South. Calling the Southern tradition the last non-materialist civilization in the Western world, he traced its roots to feudalism, chivalry, religiosity, and aristocratic conventions. The Old South, he concluded, may indeed be a hall hung with splendid tapestries in which no one would care to live; but from them we can learn something of how to live. Weaver's exploration of the ideals and ideas of the Southern tradition as expressed in the military histories, autobiographies, diaries, and novels of the era following the Civil Warespecially those written by the men and women on the losing sideis offered to a new generation of readers for whom that tradition has fallen into disrepute and who can scarcely imagine a life rooted in nature, the soil, and a powerful sense of honor. The Southern Tradition at Bay is, as Jeffrey Hart noted, the work of a man who admired what is admirable indeed, and that is the foundation of wisdom and indeed sanity.

Richard M. Weaver believed that "rhetoric at its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves." Language is Sermonic offers eight of Weaver's best essays on the nature of traditional rhetoric and its role in shaping society.

Originally published in 1948, at the height of post-World War II optimism and confidence in collective security, this title uses "words hard as cannonballs" to present an unsparing diagnosis of the ills of the modern age. It argues that the decline of Western civilization resulted from the rising acceptance of relativism over absolute reality.