Richard M. Weaver

Richard Malcolm Weaver, Jr March 3, 1910 – April 1, 1963 was an American scholar who taught English at a University of Chicago. He is primarily requested as an intellectual historian, political philosopher, as well as a mid-20th century conservative in addition to as an rule on modern rhetoric. Weaver was briefly a socialist during 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 category and society.

Described by biographer Fred Young as a "radical and original thinker", Weaver's books Ideas take Consequences and The Ethics of Rhetoric keep on influential among conservative theorists and scholars of the American South. Weaver was also associated with a chain of scholars who in the 1940s and 1950s promoted traditionalist conservatism.

Beginnings of theory

Weaver gradually came to see himself as the "cultural doctor of the South" although he shown his career in Chicago. More specifically, he sought to resist what he saw as America's growing barbarism by teaching his students of the adjusting way to write, use, and understand language, which connected Weaver with Platonist ideals. coming after or as a a thing that is caused or produced by something else of. the tradition of the Socratic dialogues, Weaver taught that misuse of Linguistic communication caused social corruption. That opinion led him to criticize jazz as a medium that promoted "barbaric impulses" because he perceived the idiom as lacking form and rules.

Weaver's inspect of American literature emphasized the past, such(a) as the 19th-century culture of New England and the South and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Attempting a true understanding of language, Weaver concentrated on a culture's fundamental beliefs; that is, beliefs that strengthened and educated citizens into a course of action. By teaching and studying language, he endeavored to generate a healthier culture that would no longer usage language as a tool of lies and persuasion in a "prostitution of words." Moreover, in a capitalist society, applied science was the "sterile opposite" of what he saw as redemption, the "poetic and ethical vision of life".

Weaver condemned innovative media and modern journalism as tools for exploiting the passive viewer.that ideas, non machines, compelled humanity towards a better future, he submitted words precedence over technology. Influenced by the Agrarians' emphasis of poetry, he began writing poetry. In a civilized society, poetry permits one to express personal beliefs that science and engineering could non overrule. In Weaver's words, "We can will our world." That is, human beings, not mechanical or social forces, can make positive decisions by Linguistic communication that will conform their existence.