When Ideas Had Consequences—Or, Whatever Happened to Intellectual History?

Early in the postwar period, the conservative intellectual Richard Weaver published an influential book entitled Ideas Have Consequences. Perhaps Weaver felt his title stated the obvious in 1948; yet it is doubtful that twenty-first–century historians would share his confidence in such a simple and unqualified cause-and-effect relationship. In today’s intellectual climate, Weaver’s pronouncement seems to project a quaintly outmoded tone. Not only did the phrase mimic the certitude of a mathematical axiom or a self-evident truth, but it gave primacy to reason and implied a scientific penchant for observable results. Ironically, Weaver’s title was misleading; more precisely, its double meaning could be understood only after digesting his argument. For Ideas Have Consequences was a jeremiad on the “dissolution of the West” and an attack against (what he saw as) the moral relativism and misguided rationalism of the modern age: including the inordinate value that “present civilization” placed on science, secularism, democracy, equality, personal happiness, and progress. Hence the deeper thrust of his title was that Western civilization began to disintegrate once individuals abandoned their traditional belief in transcendent “universals” (beginning around the year 1300) and started thinking for themselves. Ideas were destructive things, because their applications spawned the “mass psychosis,” “abysmality,” “hysterical optimism,” “insensibility,” “decadence,” and “egotism” that turned modern man into a “moral idiot.”

While I have no appetite for Weaver’s conclusions and do not share his nostalgia for medieval Christendom, I agree with him that ideas have been, and still are, powerful agents for change in human behavior: political, economic, social, and religious. Alternatively, ideas have been and are powerful obstacles to change; to use current terminology, paradigm shifts rarely occur without struggle. And though Weaver chose to focus solely on what he saw as the destructive consequences of modern thought, I would suggest that there were many constructive consequences too. Notwithstanding its ideological enthusiasms, Ideas Have Consequences contained many useful insights, even for readers who were not innately hostile to the effects of the extended age of reason. Thus I will venture the (possibly perverse) admission that, of all the books I disagree with, this is one I would recommend to others. Not because I accept its quasi-theological worldview or agree with its culturally reactionary analysis of twentieth-century civilization, but because I wholeheartedly endorse its more fundamental message: that what persons believe dictate the essential characteristics of their society. (Notice I say “believe” rather than “think,” and I will expand upon this distinction later.)

But one book, or one author, does not constitute a pattern. Weaver, his “new conservatism” aside, was writing within an established tradition of historical discourse. Far from ignoring the standard “great books” canon or “seminal thinkers” pantheon, his iconoclasm portrayed the major modern thinkers in a negative light (literally, since he referred to their ideas as “the powers of darkness”). In other words, Weaver agreed with mainstream intellectuals that such luminaries as Bacon, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Comte, and Darwin mattered; but to him their undeniable influence had been counterproductive. The notion that modern thought was the sum total of the thinking of such characters, and that a critical component of modern life was the application of their cumulative thought to practical pursuits, was not at issue. Quite the contrary, it was a prevailing view of the era. As the British historian R. G. Collingwood’s classic The Idea of History declared in 1946: “The historian is not concerned with events as such at all. He is only concerned with those events which are the outward expression of thoughts, and is only concerned with these in so far as they express thoughts. At bottom, he is concerned with thoughts alone.” And, in 1939, Max Lerner’s Ideas Are Weapons—which in a later preface he called “a study in the trajectory of ideas”—explored the writings of (among others) Thoreau, Holmes, Brandeis, Veblen, Lippmann, and Marx, because they were “men who have strongly influenced our contemporary thinking, and shaped what we call the modern mind.”¹

Such reifications as the “modern” or “Western” or “American mind” allowed...