Ideas Have Consequences: First-Rate Title, Third-Rate Book
Remnant Review
I begin with an aphorism: "Moral ideas without institutional sanctions are impotent. Institutional sanctions without moral ideas are tyrannical."
Every civilization attempts to deal with this aphorism. So does every political movement. There is never universal agreement on either the content of morality or the efficiency of the sanctions. This is a battle for the minds of men. It never ceases.
I have been active in the conservative movement ever since 1956. By 1960, I had come to this realization: American conservatism after World War II has lacked anything remotely resembling a consistent philosophical defense. This has made it impossible to create a coherent conservative political movement.
Think of the great books expounding conservative political philosophy -- books that are quoted, defended, and developed by articulate political leaders. You can't. There aren't any such books.
How consistent is political conservatism? Consider these two examples.
Ronald Reagan in 1982 expressed his admiration for Franklin Roosevelt's leadership. He did so at a luncheon honoring FDR.
Newt Gingrich, in his 1995 inaugural address as Speaker of the House, waxed eloquent: " . . . I think the greatest Democratic President of the 20th century, and in my judgment the greatest President of the 20th century, said it right." He then quoted Roosevelt's inaugural address: "We have nothing to fear but . . . fear itself." He passed over the rest of that ethically monstrous speech, including Roosevelt's rhetorical invocation of the politics of envy:
. . . the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.
The conservative moment has no map, no rudder, and not much common sense. It never has.
At the heart of the conservative movement there is a philosophical and moral void. It is a movement whose leaders do not take seriously either political philosophy or ethics. Its intellectuals have been unable to develop a systematic yet compelling case for a conservative political agenda. There is no conservative agenda, other than this: "Throw the rascals out!"
This lack of coherence can be seen in a single book: Richard Weaver's, Ideas Have Consequences. The title has had consequences. The book has not. There is no coherence linking the title and the content of the book. Conservative intellectuals have long referred to the book as a classic. It is not a classic book. It is a classic title.
Let me provide some background.
CONSERVATISM VS. LIBERTARIANISM
In 1961, Murray Rothbard wrote an article for Modern Age, the main academic outlet for the conservative movement. He commented on the work of Frank Meyer to reconcile -- fuse -- libertarianism and conservatism. He wrote this:
Meyer recognizes the primacy of reason, and realizes that simple reliance on tradition is an impossible task. Because of the infinite number of historical traditions handed down to us, we must select and choose; and our only weapon in this selection is our reason. And yet, despite his basic recognition of the primacy of reason, Meyer leans too far over on the "conservative" side of this dialogue by emphasizing that reason must operate "within tradition," and not in any sort of "ideological hubris… ignoring the accumulated wisdom of mankind." Now when Mr. Meyer recognizes that the conservatives must employ reason to select between true and false traditions, he has placed himself above and not within tradition, and necessarily so. A man cannot be within something, and yet judge it from all outside standard.
He challenged the conservative movement to quit talking about tradition, which is a morally and philosophically empty concept, and start taking seriously the concept of economic cause and effect. He argued that the free market's concept of private property, voluntary exchange, and competitive pricing leads to a system of accounting that enables men to count the cost of their actions. Free-market economists have a conceptual system to defend economic causation in history. Conservatives have nothing comparable to this.
He could have gone on to say this: from the time of Edmund Burke until the present, conservatives have rejected the idea of any kind of rationalism that would impose some kind of systematic order in society. Conservatives from Burke to the present have rejected the idea of intellectual systems as such as a way to explain society or to change it. Yet Burke and Adam Smith were friends, and they spoke well of each other's ideas. Smith was an economist: a system builder. Burke was not. How could they cooperate? But they did.
How is it that the same intellectual schizophrenia also marks today's conservative movement -- a denial of the legitimacy of grand systems of logic and the simultaneous invocation of economic theory? Why is it that conservative intellectuals only rarely mention this obvious dualism, and never write books about how it can be overcome? This dualism has been the elephant in the library ever since 1790: Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Actually, it goes back a lot further.
PARMENIDES VS. HERACLITUS
Basically, this has been a fundamental debate that goes back to pre-Socratic philosophy. Parmenides believed in an overarching system of logic. Logically coherent systems do not evolve. They are internally consistent and self-contained. (We are told by philosophers that Kurt Gödel has disproved this, but I am not smart enough to understand him.)
In contrast, his intellectual rival Heraclitus believed in history as the constant arena of life. This is the law of history: everything flows (panta rei). The problem for Heraclitus was this: there is no way to explain how the endless changes in history are related to some kind of overarching system of cause and effect. There is no such system, according to Heraclitus. Everything flows, including logic.
F. A. Hayek accepted a version of Heraclitus. He accepted the concept of intellectual evolution, which he said rests on social evolution. He did not believe in any permanent system of logic. His arguments usually defended the free market in terms of logic, which means that in this sense he was a follower of Parmenides. He never figured out how to hold these two contradictory approaches to social causation at the same time. (I discuss this aspect of Hayek's thought in Appendix B of my book, Sovereignty and Dominion. The appendix first appeared in 1982. Download it for free here.)
The conservatives, being committed to Heraclitus's concept that everything flows, do not have any systematic answers to the statists. They appeal to tradition. Or they appeal to feeling. Or they appeal to intuition. All of this is supposed to enable them to come up with arguments against socialism, Keynesianism, and all the other isms of our generation. But conservatives always wind up quoting Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, or Ludwig von Mises. When it comes to explaining the market, they fall back into the categories of economic logic and the institutional arrangements of the free market, which rest on a system of sanctions tied to accounting. In other words, they invoke profit and loss both in fact (Burke) and theory (Smith). In short, they cheat.
Most economists believe that ideas have consequences. But even within the camp of economists, there are skeptics. Nobel prize-winning University of Chicago economist George Stigler did not believe that economic outcomes have had any effect in shaping the history of economic thought. He thought the history of economic thought is all logic, no history. The best answer to this is Murray Rothbard's two-volume study, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995). Here, we see that economists have always argued in terms of contemporary practical matters as well as theoretical issues, which cannot be separated.
In contrast to Stigler, Armen Alchian, who was also something of a Chicago school economist, argued once that correct economic ideas need have no impact at all on outcomes. Economic competition decides who survives and who doesn't. Ideas need not have consequences.
I recognize that these are arcane arguments. But they reflect a fundamental dualism that is at the heart of modern economic theory: the relation (if any) between economic ideas and institutional practice. Arcane arguments are basic to modern academia, and when push comes to shove, people on the battlefields of politics resort to invoking academics of one kind or other. John Maynard Keynes was correct in the final pages of The General Theory (1936):
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
So, we are back to this question: do ideas have consequences?
IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, INDIRECTLY
The power of ideas to shape society has been well known in the West for as long as Western civilization has existed. It goes back at least to the Old Testament, and it certainly was affirmed by Greek philosophers.
But there has always been a debate between those who believe that action speaks louder than words vs. those who think that the pen is mightier than the sword. For the sword to be mighty, there must be institutional sanctions.
Bad ideas can produce bad policies, and bad policies then produce bad results. This has to do with sanctions: negative feedback within the social system. Ideas are structured by institutional sanctions. For cause and effect to operate between ideas and consequences, these must be a predictable system of sanctions.
In short, it is not the mere fact of intellectual error that is central. The crucial factor is a cause-and-effect feedback system that is built into institutions. If policy makers come up with a bad idea, and they implement it institutionally, especially by means of government coercion, then the bad idea will produce negative feedback of one kind or another. This feedback may be internally generated: endogenous negative sanctions. From inside the system, we begin to get negative feedback. If the bad policies are continued, and if they are extended deeply into a society, negative feedback will get more obvious. Constituencies who don't like the results of the negative feedback will begin to organize to change the system.
In other words, it is not simply the fact that an idea is bad; it is the fact that the idea, when implemented, produces negative results. These negative results compound over time, leading to either a breakdown of the institutional system or a revolt by a significant minority within the system. Think "federal deficit."
I am therefore a believer in the book's title: Ideas Have Consequences. The book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1948. It was written by a University of Chicago English instructor, Richard Weaver. The faculty did not make him a professor until 1957 -- a fact mentioned by the conservative book publisher Henry Regnery in an article on Weaver in Modern Age (Spring 1988). This short book established his reputation as one of the leading theorists of the conservative movement in the United States.
It is really a third-rate book. Hardly anyone has ever read it. We rarely see ideas from the book quoted in other books. All that we ever see from the book is its title.
The fascinating fact is this: Weaver hated the title. The title was imposed by the man who was the head of University of Chicago Press, William T. Couch. This fact was published in 2001 in First Things, a journal edited by Richard Neuhaus.
Richard Weaver, it may be said, was conservative when conservatism wasn't cool. A professor of English at the University of Chicago from the mid-1940s until his untimely death in 1963, Weaver is best remembered today for Ideas Have Consequences (1948), a meditation on the decline and hoped-for renewal of Western Civilization. Interestingly, the title, proposed by William Terry Couch of the University of Chicago Press, was loathed by Weaver, who described it later as "hopelessly banal" and had even considered withdrawing the manuscript.
According to Regnery, Weaver wanted this title: Fearful Descent. If he had gotten his way, that would have killed book sales. I say this as a former book publisher who provided the titles, designed the cover illustrations, and wrote the the back cover copy, the flyleaf copy, and the advertising copy.
This must have been a real donnybrook: a very smart teacher vs. an editor who was not interested in scholarship. I am one of the last people still around who knew Couch. In the summer of 1963, I spent three months working as the lone apprentice in a start-up libertarian think tank, the Center for American Studies, which soon shut down. Couch was one of six senior staffers. I got to listen to him at lunches and coffee breaks. He was inarticulate. He could not carry an argument. He was crusty, even uncommunicative. The men around him were brighter and far better educated. In retrospect, I understand him better now than I did then. He had spent his career vetoing suggestions by men who were better informed than he was about their topics, but not about publishing. He had headed up the University of North Carolina Press before he came to Chicago. His publishing career ended after he was editor-in-chief of Collier's Encyclopedia. At the end of his career, he found himself in a think tank that did not yet publish books. He was out of his depth intellectually, but without power. In 1947, he had power. The title he chose for Weaver's book had nothing to do with the content of the book. Weaver understood this. Couch would not budge. He knew what would sell. Weaver didn't. Couch's title was one of the greatest titles in the history of the American conservative movement.
The book's ideas have had few consequences for the history of American conservatism, but the title has. The contrast between the influence of the book's title and the lack of influence of book's content in either academia or politics is ironic. This fact is never mentioned. That is why I am mentioning it. If you have a lot of time on your hands, read the book. See if my evaluation is correct.
It is not the sort of book that inspires men to a lifetime of dedicated service. It is a "two chapters, and I'll finish it later" sort of book.
IDEAS AND INSTITUTIONS
Robert Nisbet had a wonderful phrase: "Ideas do not beget ideas the way that butterflies beget butterflies." His point: ideas have consequences, but only through institutional arrangements. He was a sociologist, and he paid a lot of attention to institutional arrangements. He was also a superb historian of ideas.
I have argued since 1987 that every institution is structured in the following way:
Sovereignty: "Who's in charge here?"
Authority: "To whom do I report?"
Law: "What are the rules?"
Sanctions: "What do I get if I obey? Disobey?"
Succession: "Does this outfit have a future?"
I have used this model to analyze economic theory: The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics (2015). You can download it here.
Sanctions are crucial for any organization. So is the concept of causation, which relies on sanctions. There are rules. Men's ideas establish the rules. Here is where ideas begin to have consequences. But they do not have autonomous consequences.
There also have to be people who have sanctioned the ideas. There has to be trust in these ideas. There has to be legitimacy. This always involves an appeal to authority. But institutional authority always rests on a concept of sovereignty: the final court of appeal.
Weaver's book did not identify any source of sovereignty. It invoked a vague god, but this god was some kind of impersonal philosophical concept, not the God of the Bible. As a conservative southerner, he did not believe in a strong federal government, which was a good thing. But he never offered a defense of any meaningful institutional authority that could replace the federal government's authority. He never developed any kind of legal theory or ethical theory that would tell us what the state ought to do or not do. He had no theory of sanctions in history. He had no theory of history at all. This is why his book's content has had so little influence.
This book is sometimes said to be one of the two founding documents of post-World War II American intellectual conservatism. The other is Russell Kirk's book, The Conservative Mind (1953). Kirk also avoided the issues of sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and the future. He offered no theory of social causation.
Weaver was a defender of southern agrarianism, one of the most lost of causes in the history of American lost causes. He thought small farms using mules or horses should be the method of feeding the world. A more famous book's title describes southern agrarianism accurately: gone with the wind. He was trying to revive a corpse.
He did not like free market capitalism. He was a defender of property, but this did not include any kind of property except land. He did not think that financial instruments are legitimate property deserving of legal unreserved protection.
Every summer, he returned home to Weaverville, North Carolina. Before he arrived, he had his mother hire someone to plow a garden for him. He insisted that this be done by mule or horse. He rode the train home. He hated airplanes on principle. The man was a true eccentric.
He was a defender of Plato's concept of Ideas. I do not mean ideas. I mean Ideas -- metaphysically independent, autonomous, unchanging impersonal standards that are outside of history, yet which somehow are available to political leaders and philosopher kings to use state coercion to shape society. Plato never said exactly how these unchanging Ideas connect with history. His philosophy was dialectical: an unstable mixture of Parmenides' unchanging but meaningless logical forms and Heraclitus' ever-changing but equally meaningless historical flux.
The best way to understand Plato's political philosophy is to read volume one of Karl Popper's book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Plato was a totalitarian. Nobody has shown this any more clearly than Popper. This is why his book is one of the most hated books in academia. Those academics who favor Plato tend to favor a centralized state. They are appalled by the fact that Popper blew the whistle on Plato. Worse, he quoted Plato in context. "Foul!"
Platonism is a package deal. You don't get to proclaim epistemological deliverance by means of Plato's metaphysical Ideas, but then decide you don't like communism and political rulers who lie for the greater good.
Weaver was a defender of Platonic categories as a way to restore social order. His Platonism is more visible in The Ethics of Rhetoric than in Ideas Have Consequences. The Ethics of Rhetoric, lacking a catchy title, has had zero influence. In any case, Ideas Have Consequences has never had remotely as much influence on conservative intellectuals as volume one of The Open Society and Its Enemies has had. For this, we should be grateful.
CONSERVATIVE POLITICAL THEORY: ANTI-THEORY
Ideas do have consequences. But if this is true, then the American conservative political movement has always been in trouble. That is because the American conservative political movement has been devoid of any systematic philosophical justification. You will search in vain for any discussion of philosophy, ethics, or social theory in the popular literature of American political conservatism. This is not something new. This has been true for the entire postwar period. Before World War II, American conservatism was not an identifiable movement, either intellectually or institutionally.
Beginning in the 1950's, a handful of academics began to invoke the writings of a pair of rival immigrant political philosophers who had fled Nazi Germany, Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Strauss was coherent when he wanted to be. He did not always want to be. As with Plato, he was a defender of the legitimacy of political lying: philosophers and rulers who conceal the truth from the masses by means of hidden meanings. Strauss could be arcane, and often was. In contrast, Voegelin was only randomly coherent. Neoconservative academics have adopted Strauss, but as soon as anybody adopts Voegelin, he becomes as incoherent as Voegelin was. Nobody ever hears from him again. (Voegelin was a follower of a German mystical poet, Stefan George.)
So, if we believe that ideas have consequences, then American conservatism has a big problem: the absence of systematic ideas. Conservatives pick up their ideas from free-market economists. This goes back to Edmund Burke, who picked up ideas from Adam Smith. But Burke never incorporated the economic theories of Smith into his own thinking. He was philosophically opposed to doing this.
Burke established the intellectual foundations of the modern conservative movement. When you build a political movement that is based on the idea that there are no overarching logical ideas to guide you in the formation of policy, all you can do is oppose the latest program of Leftist social reconstruction in the name of an earlier tradition. You wind up doing what conservatives in Congress do: accept the New Deal's institutional legacies, but then oppose any more extensions of New Deal social theory in legislation. It is basically this strategy: "We, too, but slower."
Edmund Burke was not Platonic. This was a major problem for Richard Weaver, who was Platonic. There has never been any way of importing the fundamental ideas articulated by Richard Weaver into a movement that is inherently Burkean.
Burke was opposed to the idea that logical ideas have consequences. He believed in tradition, not political philosophy. He was the great political philosopher of no political philosophy.
BURKE'S SITUATIONAL ETHICS
You may have noticed that the American political conservative movement is in disarray. There are lots of reasons for this, but this is the main one: the conservative movement has been philosophically in disarray since 1790.
Burke's political philosophy is based on the assumption that ideas do not have consequences. Anyway, large, overarching ideas do not have consequences. This includes the logic of economics. Traditional ideas have consequences, Burkeans insist, but only for as long as the masses don't change their minds about traditional institutions. Whenever the masses change their minds, which they inevitably do when circumstances change, they quietly abandon the old traditions. Then conservatives are stuck with task of defending the new, improved traditions.
The obvious example of this rewriting of history in American history is Southern chattel slavery. This is still an embarrassing fact for conservatives who defend the illusive Southern tradition. It was even more embarrassing for defenders of the Confederacy in 1866, who dropped down the memory hole the states' official ante-bellum defenses of secession: defenses of chattel slavery. They substituted a state's rights Constitutionalism. The grand master of this substitution was the former Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens. He wrote A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1867-70, 2 volumes). He never again invoked his own pre-war justification of secession: the Cornerstone speech of 1861.
Slavery was the crucial topic that Russell Kirk avoided like the plague in The Conservative Mind. He discussed at great length the political philosophy of Southern politicians in the ante-bellum years, but somehow failed to analyze their defense of slavery as a traditional institution extending back into the mists of time. Anyone who thinks this was an oversight on Kirk's part would probably accept at face value Alexander Hamilton's answer to the man who asked him why the Constitutional Convention never put any reference to God into the Constitution. "We forgot."
Burkean intellectuals have offered no way of evaluating the legitimacy of illogical ideas in terms of logical ideas. They invoke tradition, feeling, intuition, and the always popular transcendence -- all of which are empty categories, both logically and ethically.
If we argue that the best way to answer a bad idea is with a better idea, then we must have access to reliable standards of truth by which to evaluate ideas. If these are metaphysical standards of truth, ethics, and aesthetics that are based on the assumption of cosmic impersonalism, then we wind up in Plato's camp. That was what Weaver did.
On the other hand, if there are no ideas that have permanent predictable consequences, because there are no permanent sanctions in history, then we wind up with social evolution: changing sanctions leading to changing standards. This was Hayek's solution to the dilemma.
To counter this conclusion, we must assume this: built into the social order is a system of sanctions in which permanent ethics will ultimately be triumphant. This is a denial of situational ethics.
Here is the conservatives' dilemma: Burkean conservatism is at bottom a self-conscious philosophy of situational ethics -- circumstances, as he put it. Conservative philosophers in Burke's tradition reject the idea of legitimacy for any system of overarching logic as a way either to shape society or to explain it. They are exhausted swimmers in the middle of Heraclitus' Mississippi-size river of ceaseless historical change.
In short, conservative political philosophy is schizophrenic: caught between Weaver's Platonism and Burke's situational ethics. Neoconservatives have come to the rescue by offering Strauss as the way out of this dilemma: a philosophy based on the necessity of political lying and concealment for the greater good.
I have no faith in the conservative movement as anything more than a holding action against the fiscally doomed statism of our era. This is because I understand the truth of this aphorism: "You can't beat something with nothing."
THE EXCLUSION OF CHRISTIANITY
Nothing in Ideas Have Consequences offered anything of substance to Christians. There was nothing in the book that gave any sign of Christianity's answers to the questions of sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, or the future. Catholic Christians accepted a natural law tradition by way of Thomas Aquinas. But Aquinas was a follower of Aristotle, not Plato. They would have expected some mention of the God of the Bible. There was none. Weaver showed no evidence of being a Christian. Evangelical Protestants had no place at the table, either. There was no mention of God, the Bible, biblical law, the church, or the final judgment.
The conservative movement after 1947 offered no welcome to Christians. The economists were self-consciously agnostic. This had always been the case. The Wealth of Nations spoke of an invisible hand, not God. Economists had never paid any attention to Smith's deistic treatise, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Weaver was content to throw a few crumbs their way, as long as they were willing to accept Greek categories of metaphysical realism by way of Plato's Ideas.
Burke opposed grand schemes in politics. Theology is a grand scheme. Theology offers answers to the questions of sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and the future. Theology also has theories of how eternity and history are connected. Burke did not want any invasion of politics by eternity. He did not want any movement to invoke permanent standards in history.
So, the American conservative movement was, from its start in the late 1940's, either neutral toward Christianity or else suspicious of it. It was not until Reagan's candidacy for President in the summer of 1980 that evangelicals pushed their way into the small but growing tent of the conservative movement. The rise of the New Christian Right took place outside the halls of academe, where Weaver and the leadership had dominated ever since 1948.
The shock troops of the conservative movement have always been the Christians. They had the votes to swing elections. But they were never welcome if they came self-consciously as Christians. They were supposed to be content with Plato or Aristotle, the traditionalists said, plus some Burke if they were so were inclined. The economists invoked Kant if they invoked any philosopher, but usually they preferred to be ethically neutral and epistemologically silent.
This is why Richard Weaver's ideas have had so few consequences in American conservative politics. When Christians go in search of wisdom regarding sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time, they do not go to Plato.
CONCLUSIONS
Ideas Have Consequences is a great book title. But did its ideas have consequences? Not many.
There is a book on this: Steps Toward Restoration: The Consequences of Richard Weaver's Ideas (1998). You can buy it on Amazon. So far, no one has posted a comment. Maybe you can be the first.
The title offered hope. The contents did not deliver. In my view, this is representative of American conservative political philosophy.
Conservatism has made its strongest case for liberty when it has cited the conclusions of free market economics -- an intensely logical system of analysis that is neither Platonic nor Burkean. This long-term arrangement has yet to advance to the status of a marriage of convenience. For conservative political theory, economic logic has been its significant other. Neither side is prepared to take any public vows.
I can visualize the wedding. There would be a dozen bastard children in attendance, plus at least 75 grandkids.
I am grateful for Richard Weaver. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute set up a scholarship program for graduate students half a century ago. It is called the Weaver Fellowship Program. I won a Weaver Fellowship in 1969. Some people might regard this essay as an example of biting the hand that fed you. I will only say this. With respect to the ideas of Richard Weaver, they didn't have any consequences in my thinking. But I have been an enthusiastic defender of his main book's title.