RICHARD M. WEAVER’S Ideas Have Consequences, published 75 years ago, is not really a book about how ideas have consequences. It’s a book about what one idea, propounded by the medieval friar William of Occam—“the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence”—has wrought through the ages.
In Weaver’s view, the answer was nothing good. Occam’s nominalist philosophy has produced a squishy relativism that rejects objective morality and a blindered materialism that doubts the validity of anything that can’t be empirically measured. It has led us to undervalue community, eschew tradition, and forget that rights are accompanied by duties. Weaver’s book, the title of which became an anthem of mid-century American conservatism, was an attempt to
