Sublime

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.

Weaver was a professor of rhetoric.

Weaver was “a

Weaver was “a

In fact, though, Weaver was not so much antiliberal as antimodern. This shows itself, for example, in his discussion of private property. He praises private property as “the last metaphysical right.” But although he clearly appreciates the place of private property in fostering liberty and forestalling the tyranny of the state, his defense is actua

he was interested in criticizing the forces that had undermined those virtues. The enemy, he thought, was not so much Grant’s and Sherman’s armies as the spirit that moved them. It was “science and technology.” It was centralized government. It was the ethic of “total war.” It was affluence, materialism, and the love of comfort. It was the demand f

Weaver warns about “the insolence of material success,” the “technification of the world,” the obliteration of distinctions that make living “strenuously, or romantically” possible. “Presentism,” the effort to begin each day, as Allen Tate put it, as if there were no yesterday, has robbed man of his history and therefore his identity as a moral age