ABSTRACT
Richard Weaver was, among other things, a Southerner, a conservative and a rhetorician. The relationship between his Southern background and his analysis of contemporary social and political issues has been much discussed and has been perhaps best summarized by M. E. Bradford. Likewise, rhetoricians consider Weaver's rhetorical theories while largely ignoring his politics. Richard L. Johannesen mentions that Weaver was a conservative, claims that this is significant in understanding his rhetoric, and then drops the point. Weaver's belief that the West is declining, no matter how, led him, at a higher level to make a profound analysis of the general nature of culture and its constituent parts. In this analysis, rhetoric is very closely tied to culture: Whenever he writes of culture, rhetoric is not far in the background and vice versa. Several of Weaver's ideas on the relationship between rhetoric and culture have now been presented.
