Richard Weaver and the Conservatism of Piety
Confronted with choices between evil and good, man frequently chooses evil with its accompanying anguish. Would not wisdom and prudence dictate that man ought to be modest, restrained, and humble—in a word, pious?
Born in Weaverville, North Carolina in 1910, Richard Malcolm Weaver was raised in Lexington, Kentucky. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Weaver graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1932. In that year, he joined the American Socialist Party; however, from the outset, Richard Weaver was disenchanted with that association and his flirtation with socialism was brief: “I could not like the members of the movement as persons. They seemed dry, insistent people, of shallow objectives.”[1] He attended graduate school at Vanderbilt University where he obtained his M.A. in 1934. At Vanderbilt, Weaver was influenced by the Fugitive-Agrarians who were assembled there. In particular, he was deeply moved by one of the most eminent of that group, John Crowe Ransom. Weaver contended that Ransom’s God Without Thunder, published in 1930, was “the profoundest of books to come out of the Agrarian movement.”[2] The subtitle of Ransom’s work was “an unorthodox defense of orthodoxy,” and in his analysis, Ransom warned against “the watered theology of the advanced moderns;” he proposed that we “do what we can to recover the excellences of the ancient faith.” Weaver wrote his M.A. thesis, “The Revolt Against Humanism,” under the direction of Ransom.
Weaver obtained his doctorate in English from Louisiana State University in 1943. His dissertation, “The Confederate South, 1865-1910: A study in the Survival of a…