In 1948, the University of Chicago Press published one of the foundational texts of the modern conservative movement: Ideas Have Consequences. Coming just a few years after another foundational text, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, described the costs of expansive government, Ideas Have Consequences focused more on issues of culture and morality. Its main argument was that by embracing relativism over absolute truth, the West had set the stage for its own decline. The consequences would be not just political and economic chaos but also the loss of individual liberty and social order.
The book’s publication gave the movement one of its most enduring intellectual concepts and marketing slogans. Since the early 1950s, few conservative or libertarian organizations have failed to proclaim that “ideas have consequences,” and many have included the phrase in their mission statements, stationery, and websites. The publication of Ideas Have Consequences also launched its author, a previously obscure professor of English at the University of Chicago, into the forefront of the postwar debate about the future of American culture and politics.
His name was Richard Weaver. Although he spent much of his career elsewhere, Weaver was a proud North Carolinian. His family had deep roots in the Tar Heel State. In fact, his hometown is actually named Weaverville, in Buncombe County.
After obtaining his Ph.D. in English from Louisiana State University in 1943, Weaver took his first teaching job at North Carolina State University, after which he relocated his academic life to the University of Chicago. Still, Richard Weaver never really left North Carolina. It was more than just a birthplace to him. He purchased a home in Weaverville and spent most of his summers there. That’s where his mother lived, and where the extended Weaver clan would gather for an annual reunion – an event that often featured a learned discourse by Weaver himself.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Richard Weaver wrote many other books and articles as a leading spokesman for the traditionalist strand of the conservative movement. He became one of the early contributing editors to William F. Buckley’s new magazine National Review in the mid-1950s, and in 1957 wrote the first article of the first issue of Modern Age, a journal created by conservative scholar Russell Kirk. The latter publication would later move to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, also an organization in which Richard Weaver played an important early role.
American conservatism – that fusion of free-market economics, traditional values, and constitutionalism – owes a great deal to North Carolina. Richard Weaver is but one of many prominent scholars, authors, journalists, and political leaders with significant ties to the Tar Heel State who have played major roles in building what became the modern conservative movement. For example, Gastonia native Thomas Sowell is one of the country’s most prominent free-market economists. His many books, articles, and columns explore a wide range of issues, from fiscal and regulatory policy to education, affirmative action, and economic history. Vermont Royster, a Raleigh native and graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, became editor of The Wall Street Journal and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. His editorial direction and erudite, elegant columns helped make the Journal’s editorial page a must-read for conservatives everywhere – and for those who would understand the American Right.
In the John Locke Foundation’s just-published book First in Freedom: Transforming Ideas into Consequences for North Carolina, my colleagues and I apply the timeless ideas of thinkers such as Weaver, Sowell, and Royster to such 21st-century challenges as economic stagnation, tax and regulatory burdens, and educational mediocrity.
First in Freedom contains lots of practical suggestions and advice for North Carolina’s new governor and General Assembly. It is intended to inform and propel the cause of conservative reform in our state. But the book also serves to honor those intellectual forebears who helped build the case for conservative reform in the first place.
“All work,” wrote Richard Weaver, “is a bringing of the ideal from potentiality into actuality.” Let’s get cracking.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and a contributor to First in Freedom: Transforming Ideas into Consequences for North Carolina.