This book helped me to understand a lot more the cultural, or collective mindset, of the South. Weaver had a lot of very interesting insights into why the South thinks the way that it does, and how different historical events have changed it. In particular, his point that the South is arguably the only part of the country that has suffered defeat (a fact which has strengthened its literature) was particularly noteworthy. I didn't agree with all of Weaver's points, being decidedly on the Union's side of the civil war. However, it really helped me to understand a lot of different facets of Southern culture. As a result, it was a thoughtful and intriguing read.

3-3.5 Stars. (Good)

This small but dense foray into the mind of Richard Weaver offers, in one place, a full accounting of his essays and speeches which dealt explicitly with the American South. With Weaver's typical incisive and circumspect commentary, it represents one of the most instructive and informed portraits of the region.

Weaver approaches the American South from multiple perspectives: as a historical force, as a foil to America at large, as a unique cultural and geographic unit. He tackles these subjects both generally and precisely, as in his essays focusing on John Randolph, Robert E. Lee. and Albert Taylor Bledsoe. He ruminates over speeches and histories and lives, and produces a full and remarkable synthesis of the South.

Naturally, the fact that this collection is a compendium creates some issues. Weaver sometimes appears to be redundant when emphasizing a point made in a previous essay, but of course Weaver had not intended for all of these works to appear together in one volume.

I would recommend this essay collection to any fans of Weaver's writings in general and to anyone interested in a more philosophical portrait of the American South.

I feel strange, almost guilty, giving a book by Richard Weaver only three stars. But for a few reasons, some outside of his control, this collection of essays does not represent Weaver's strongest showing. For instance, there is a lot of overlap, both between the essays in the book and between the essays in the book and other of Weaver's writings. Having read these Southern Essays immediately after reading his The Southern Tradition at Bay, the similarity, to the point of being identical in spots, between some of the essays and his longer treatise are striking. As the editors point out in the introduction, this is to be expected because the essays were published over the period of about two decades, some at a time when Weaver was trying and failing to find a publisher for The Southern Tradition at Bay, his PhD dissertation. Still, reading the two books back to back definitely shows the superiority of the more cohesive work.

There is also overlap between some essays and other, not specifically Southern writings. For instance, "Southern Chivalry and Total War," probably my favorite essay in the book, is simultaneously a recapitulation of a section on chivalry from The Southern Tradition at Bay and an argument in embryo that Weaver would develop in a chapter of Visions of Order. It's interesting to see the consistency of Weaver's thought across the three different works on such an interesting and important topic. However, his essay "Two Orators" also has parallels to an argument Weaver makes in The Ethics of Rhetoric, and on this score Weaver is less consistent. In "Two Orators," Weaver contrasts the arguments of northerner Daniel Webster and southerner Robert Hayne in 1830, with Weaver's approval clearly tilting towards the latter. This despite the fact that Weaver admits that Webster was the one arguing from abstract principle while Hayne was arguing more from historical circumstance. This becomes more intriguing when the reader remembers that Weaver argued in The Ethics of Rhetoric that it was the argument from principle, or "definition," that constituted the highest form - and the conservative one - of argumentation, and that arguing from circumstance was comparatively inferior. The fact that Webster is the more principled orator from this perspective does not prove that Weaver was wrong to prefer Hayne's arguments. Rather, it suggests that Russell Kirk was correct to note in a review of Ethics that Weaver's suggestion could be carried too far, and in fact that he did carry it too far in his criticisms of Edmund Burke as a rhetorician.

All of this, of course, is more applicable to those who have read much of Richard Weaver (and I encourage everyone to reach much of him). To those new to Weaver, or to his writings on the South, this book will explain a great deal of the southern mind, to the reader's benefit. One sometimes wonders if Weaver does not occasionally draw too fine a distinction between northerners and southerners, or in revealing the South's virtues too often covers its vices. But, then again, the very idea that the South has virtues is almost unutterable today, which works to the impoverishment of us all. The ideals of chivalry and distinction, the subjugation of the profit motive to manners and customs, the rootedness in place and nature that Weaver sees as characterizing the South, all these are important and even necessary correctives to the errors of modernity and the idol of progress. Weaver wrote eloquently on these topics over the course of his abbreviated life, and the fact that he did so more eloquently in other works does not diminish the value of his arguments as found here. This is a worthwhile example of Weaver's writing, even if it's not the finest on offer.