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Ideas Have Consequences (1948), a book by Richard M. Weaver had a good deal of influence stating a nostalgic, agrarian variant of political conservatism.
The book begins with a clear statement of a view often associated with Oswald Spengler, i.e. that western civilization is in an irrevocable decay.
"Civilization has been an intermittent phenomenon," Weaver wrote, and "to this truth we have allowed ourselves to be blinded by the insolence of material success." Weaver criticizes the nominalist view of the problem of universals, which he saw not only as an epistemological error but as a moral flaw, and as the cause of the decay.
The title has become a cliché in some circles in subsequent decades, although according to some sources it was the publisher's decision, one Weaver himself disliked.
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