Over the last year, I've become (almost by accident) fascinated by Richard Weaver - who he was, what he said, and what his foundational principles were. This is in part because I read a couple of Weaver's books (first, Visions of Order, then Ideas Have Consequences) and found Weaver's analysis and opinions striking, and partly because Weaver is not an easily classified figure, which makes understanding him and his thought both a more difficult and more interesting process, one considerably enabled by the internet and its reproduction of material by and about Weaver.
In one of my online Weaver excavation projects, I happened across a book review of Steps Toward Restoration, a collection of essays delivered at a 1998 conference marking the 50th anniversary of Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver's first published (but not written) book. Thanks to AbeBooks.com, I was able to find a used copy of the book, that was in remarkably good shape, which I take as an indication that I'm probably the first person to have read this particular copy (and I would be surprised if it is in many other libraries). Steps Toward Restoration is, at root, a book about a book, or at least a book about another book's author, which limits its appeal. Even so, for those interested in Weaver or his most famous book, this volume is a welcome addition.
Steps Toward Restoration is comprised of nine essays - either derived or transcribed from speeches at the celebratory conference - that look at Weaver or Ideas from different perspectives. The first essay by Ted J. Smith III, titled "How Ideas Have Consequences Came to be Written," is identical to the afterword that can be found in the most recent re-issue of Ideas, and is an interesting background to Weaver's thought that led to that book. Of particular interest was the role that Weaver's disenchantment with the effects of World War II had on his outlook and on his beliefs as expressed in Ideas and elsewhere. Next is an essay by Wilma R. Ebbitt titled "Richard Weaver, Friend and Colleague." This essay is a helpful corrective to a lot of the mythology that has grown up around Weaver the person, as Ebbitt, Weaver's colleague at the University of Chicago, shows him not to be a hermit, as is often claimed, nor an anachronistic oddball (both of which are mischaracterizations relied upon by Roger Kimball in his foreword to Ideas).
Essays three through six (by Robert Preston, Mark Malvasi, George Nash, and Lawrence Prelli) all seek to highlight specific arguments made by Weaver, and their contribution to the conservative movement. All of these are helpful in contextualizing Weaver and his ideas (and his Ideas), though Nash's essay is perhaps the most interesting in that he shows how Weaver's arguments have been used and (mostly) adopted by conservatives, or at least some conservatives since 1948. Prelli's essay, comparing Ideas with Weaver's doctoral thesis, which was later posthumously published as The Southern Tradition at Bay, is also interesting.
Chapter seven, titled "Consequences in the Provinces," had a chance to be the most illuminating essay in the book, as poet and social critic Marion Montgomery seeks to explore the latent Platonism in Weaver's thought. For me, this is a real area of interest, because Weaver's Platonic tendencies have been often-referenced (including by others in this book), but a full analysis of how this influenced his conclusions has not, as far as I know, been attempted. Montgomery, coming from an explicitly Thomist and, by extension, Aristotelian worldview, was in a good position to conduct this analysis. Unfortunately, I found Montgomery's writing to be unclear, at times to the point of incoherence, and indirect, sometimes to the point of rambling (though I should raise two points in fairness to Montgomery: first, that I am far from an expert on philosophy and, second, that this is the text of a speech given at a mostly-academic gathering, and presumably his audience had a better conceptual grasp of what Montgomery was saying that I do). Montgomery also spends as much time, or more, quoting other writers and philosophers as he does his ostensible subject so that the reader can at points forget that this is an essay about Weaver.
Occasionally, some clarity will burst through Montgomery's prose to illuminate a real area where Weaver's Platonism is at odds with a Thomist/Aristotelian perspective, and how the Thomist perspective is more accurate. But, sadly, I found these helpful parts to be much too far apart, and the length of the essay much too long (nearly 100 pages, roughly a third of the book) for the payoff. I also tend to think that Montgomery's analysis of Weaver as a philosopher is a bit off the mark, since Weaver was not primarily a philosopher, and Ideas is not primarily a philosophical work, despite Weaver's pinning the decline of Western Civilization on William of Ockham, and the general philosophical language that peppers the book. I was left with the impression that Montgomery has philosophical differences with Weaver (on which points Montgomery may have the better argument), but without a clear idea of how that influenced the book's ultimate value. The other essayists in Steps Toward Restoration who mention Plato's impact on Weaver's thought, and who might not adopt Plato as a guide in the same way that Weaver did, nevertheless value Weaver's conclusions highly, as does Thomist philosopher Edward Feser, who allows that Plato influenced Weaver, but says that he would not classify Weaver as a Platonist without qualification. There's also the fact, mentioned in several places by Ted Smith, that by the end of his life, and particularly in Visions of Order, Weaver was backtracking from his former Platonism and embracing a more balanced, perhaps even Aristotelian perspective. All of this to say that I would love to have an articulate explanation of the role that Platonism played in Weaver's thought, but Montgomery's essay is not that explanation.
The final two essays are by Ben Toledano and M. Stanton Evans. Toledano's essay, I think, would make a great introduction to traditionalist conservatism for someone new to the philosophy, but for someone who has spent much time reading Weaver, Robert Nisbet, Russell Kirk, and their fellow travelers, there's not much new here, as Toledano cites familiar lines from Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and other founding fathers of traditionalism. I really enjoyed Evans' article, in which he analogizes Weaver's positions to his own beliefs as expressed in The Theme is Freedom, but I'm a fan of Evans in general (The Theme is Freedom is one of my personal favorite books), so this is not surprising. Evans' essay includes some personal anecdotes of his interactions with Weaver, which are entertaining and enlightening.
Overall, Steps Toward Restoration is a fine addition to the literature on Weaver, and I had the thought at points that some readers might benefit from reading this book before reading Ideas (Montgomery's chapter excluded). Of course, nothing takes the place of reading Weaver's works themselves, so if it comes down to reading this or Ideas Have Consequences, read the latter.
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