ABSTRACT
Richard M. Weaver knew that an age of specialization, which placed little emphasis on liberal arts education, was hostile to the study of rhetoric. Rhetoric was also an art form that flourished in the Old South. In Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver remarked that it was no accident that the nation’s greatest creative political figures—Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson—were all Southerners steeped in rhetoric and law and educated in the “Ciceronian tradition of eloquent wisdom.” The nineteenth-century orator spoke to an audience that understood certain historical truths. This is also why we have contempt for the old rhetoric. The Ethics of Rhetoric and essays in Language is Sermonic amount in part to a rousing defense of rhetoric, not unlike the same rousing defense of private property in Ideas Have Consequences. The Ethics of Rhetoric was less well received than Ideas Have Consequences. It consolidated Weaver’s position as one of the leading lights of the intellectual Right.
