ested defense of the status quo by members of the proper-
tied classes.

Three books published over the course of a decade pro-
foundly altered this state of affairs. Despite being written
from substantially different perspectives, together they
provided an intellectually coherent foundation for an
effective conservative challenge to the political hege-
mony of the Left. The first of the three was Friedrich Hayek's
The Road to Serfdom, an incisive analysis of the
inherent deficiencies of socialism first published in
England in early 1944 and reissued in America later that
year by the University of Chicago Press. The second was
Weaver Ideas Have Consequences, a foundational critique
of modern (i.e., liberal) society and culture released by the
same press in February 1948. The third was Russell Kirk,
The Conservative Mind. Published in 1953 by the Henry
Regnery Company, it made the constructive case for the
movement by tracing the history of conservative thought
from Edmund Burke to George Santayana and beyond.
From these seeds more than any others, the modern con-
servative movement has grown.

The idea for the Richard M. Weaver Symposium origi-
nated with Dr. Robert Preston, the president of Belmont
Abbey College. My involvement dates to May 1996, when
I received a letter from Dr. Preston which outlined his
plans and offered me the pleasant task of helping to
design the program. At a meeting two months later, we
decided that the conference should focus less on the con-
tent of Ideas Have Consequences, which had already been
the subject of extensive discussion, and more on its ori-
gins and effects, including some examination of the rea-
sons for its phenomenal success. Accordingly, nine

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