Ideas and Consequences: Richard Weaver, Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Politics

Abstract

Although it has been ten years since Sharon Crowley called for Richard M. Weaver's exclusion from the canon of rhetorical history, Weaver's rhetorical positions have never been stronger, utilized in movements such as the Tea Party and current conservative rhetoric. While Crowley (2001) argued that Weaver's Platonism came from his reaction to Roosevelt's politics, this archival study suggests that Weaver was much more pragmatic than his political pronouncements have led scholars, such as Crowley, to believe. Before Weaver wrote polemical works such as “To Write the Truth,” he operated within the constraints of the philosophically rigid institutional culture of neo-Aristotelianism, and the archival record demonstrates his attenuation to this rhetorical situation. The implications for these findings diminish the effectiveness of his appropriation by political movements that are based in foundationalistic rhetoric. These implications also demonstrate how rhetorical scholarship has utilized the polemical nature of Weaver's writings in the advancement of the professionalization of the discipline.

Notes

¹Although in the coda to “When Ideology Motivates Theory” Crowley wrote, “A reviewer of [the version sent for publication] worried that its final sentence called for censorship of Weaver's work. I make no such call” (90), Crowley's final sentence, “If I had my way, certainly, [Weaver's rhetorical theory] would appear there no longer,” is being interpreted by this author as a call for his exclusion from the canon.

²I thank RR reviewers David Fleming and Andrew King for their helpful, rigorous review of this manuscript and for their special assistance in the historical context of early rhetorical scholarship and the expansion of the stakes involved in Weaver's rhetorical criticism.