Hume : Stove :: Ockham : Weaver

Explain this idea: "David Hume was to David Stove what William of Ockham was to Richard Weaver."

Here’s the gist of that analogy:

• Weaver vs. Ockham: In Ideas Have Consequences, Richard M. Weaver fingers William of Ockham’s nominalism as the fateful turn that unmoored the West from universals and objective value. For Weaver, Ockham is the prime culprit behind modern fragmentation and relativism—the intellectual villain his project is written against.

• Stove vs. Hume: The Australian philosopher David Stove made a career out of attacking David Hume’s skepticism, especially about induction and causation. Stove thought Hume’s outlook spawned a long tradition of irrationalism in modern philosophy (he also blasted Popper, Kuhn, etc.). For Stove, Hume is the chief bad influence to be refuted.

So, saying “David Hume was to David Stove what William of Ockham was to Richard Weaver” means:

In each pair, the first figure is the central foil—the thinker blamed for a deep wrong turn—whom the second figure sets out to debunk in order to rescue reason/order.

A quick mapping:

Role	Medieval/Early-modern “villain”	Later critic
Metaphysics/values	Ockham (nominalism → loss of universals)	Weaver (traditionalist critique)
Epistemology/science	Hume (skepticism → problem of induction)	Stove (robust defense of induction, anti-irrationalism)

What the analogy isn’t: it doesn’t claim Stove followed Hume or Weaver followed Ockham; quite the opposite—each later thinker defines his position against the earlier one’s signature doctrine.

It’s interesting how they both saw broad-ranging intellectual and societal consequences coming out of some very abstruse niche academic debates, about universals and about induction respectively. “Ideas have consequences”, sure, but all those consequences, out of just those ideas?

Totally fair skepticism. A neat way to think about it:

How niche ideas can scale up

1. Elite adoption → institutional codification. Abstruse theses first live in schools, courts, churches, academies. Once they’re baked into curricula, legal training, bureaucratic procedures, they travel far.
2. Permission structures. Ideas rarely force outcomes; they license moves that were harder to defend before. (E.g., if universals aren’t real, appealing to “natural kinds” or “essences” loses authority; if induction lacks justification, sweeping “laws of history” look suspect.)
3. Rationalizations for interests. Powerful actors select ideas that fit incentives. The winning idea often succeeds because it’s useful, not just true.
4. Language & metaphors. Abstract doctrines reshape everyday vocabularies (“social constructs,” “best practices,” “evidence-based”), which then steer debate and policy defaults.
5. Path dependence. Early theoretical choices create lock-ins: once embedded in textbooks, case law, or research methods, they keep reproducing themselves.

Applying that to the analogy

• Ockham → Weaver’s target. Nominalism undercuts robust universals. Downstream you can get: emphasis on particulars/individuals, suspicion of teleology, comfort with contract over essence—all of which (to Weaver) encourages cultural fragmentation. He’s tracing how a metaphysical “OS” ripples into morals, aesthetics, politics.
• Hume → Stove’s target. Radical doubts about induction become, in Stove’s story, a seed for scientific skepticism morphing into “irrationalism” (Kuhn/Popper-inflated, in his view). Here the path runs: skepticism → modesty about universal laws → methodological strictures → cultural attitudes toward truth claims.

But don’t over-credit one domino

• Monocausal stories are tidy—and misleading. Most big shifts have equifinality: you can reach similar endpoints via many routes (markets, technology, demography, wars).
• Ideas are usually enablers, not sole engines. Better to treat them as background constraints and justificatory scripts that make some policies “thinkable” and others “eccentric.”
• Reception mutates ideas. “Humean” or “Ockhamist” labels often cover later reinterpretations—Kant’s reply to Hume, or late-Scholastic voluntarism mingling with Ockham—so the downstream effect isn’t a straight line from the original texts.

A balanced takeaway

Weaver and Stove are offering genealogies of error: pick a deep premise, show how it could ramify widely, then read modern problems as its long shadow. That’s a useful diagnostic lens—it reveals hidden assumptions shaping institutions and habits. But it’s best read as one layer in a multi-cause story: ideas matter a lot, once they’re selected, taught, and embedded—alongside material incentives, technology, and contingent events.

If you want, I can sketch two alternative causal maps: one that makes Weaver’s line plausible without being monocausal, and one that makes Stove’s critique bite while showing where it likely overreaches.