Weaver was one of the pioneers of the post-war intellectual development of conservatism in America. He was graduated from the Univ. of Kentucky in 1932 and attended graduate school at Vanderbilt from 1933-36, studying under John Crowe Ransom. Although he had joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party in 1932, by 1940 he was profoundly disappointed in liberalism and spent the next 3 years studying the Civil War at Louisiana State University. His dissertation celebrated the old South, extolling it's feudal social structure, chivalry, concept of what a gentleman is and older, less intellectual religiousness.
In 1947, he published his seminal work, Ideas Have Consequences, which tried to explain the decline of the West. Weaver traced the original mistake to William of Occam (1287 - 1347). According to Weaver, the nominalism that Willam espoused led to the denial of Universals that transcend experience. This is in turn led to a decline in a belief in objective Revealed Truth and the rise of relativism, best expressed by the phrase "man is the measure of all things."
The last 3 chapters of Weaver's book explained his solution to the problem. The first step
"must be a driving afresh of the wedge between the material and the transcendental....That there is a world of ought, that the apparent does not exhaust the real -- these are so essential to the very conception of improvement that it should be superfluous to mention them...To bring dualism back into the world and rebuke the moral impotence fathered by empiricism is then the broad character of our objective."
I write about Weaver because I had thought that the emphasis on conservative religion came about more recently and yes, I didn't read Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951) but I should've inferred from the title what was afoot.
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